Do news consumers want to pay for an ad-free experience?

By many measures, Follett said, one of the very worst advertising environments is social media: “People are scrolling so tremendously quickly, like on a slot machine in Vegas—is it any wonder no one actually looks at these ads?” One of the most valuable advertising spaces, according to his data, is next to long, absorbing articles from trusted publ... See more

The Times, Peretti allowed, has since refined a very good subscription business model, which has allowed it to make better journalism by hiring more and better talent. This is not a controversial opinion. But the next part may be: The New York Times, Peretti argued, can’t really be called “the paper of record” anymore — because of that same subscri... See more

Broadly, the line between excludable and non is the line between where subscriptions vs. ads reign as business models.

The ads game is a triangle trade between user, publisher and advertiser, that at its most reductionist looks like this: A publisher provides a service, website, app or other user experience for free to a user, who pays nothing for that service, while some advertiser pays for a tiny slice of the user’s attention, and pays the publisher an amount $ₐ ... See more

The problem is that there are a lot of publications in the world that would like to be supported by subscriptions, and a lot of readers in the world that would prefer to pay for ad-free content, but nobody is making a market. This is where Twitter is making its play.