alt Hacker NewsMy family's first broadband internet connection, circa 2005, came with a monthly data quota of 400 MB.
The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out. Historically, the price of a copy of a newspaper barely covered the cost of printing; the rest of the cost was covered by advertising. And there was an awful lot of advertising: everything was advertised in newspapers. Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a section of the newspaper, as was whichever website you check for used cars or real estate listings. Journalism had to be subsidised by advertising, because most people aren't actually that interested in the news to pay the full cost of quality reporting; nowadays, the only newspapers that are thriving are those that aggressively target those who have an immediate financial interest in knowing what's going on: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and so on.
The fact is that for most people, the news was interesting because it was new every day. Now that there is a more compelling flood of entertainment in television and the internet, news reporting is becoming a niche product.
The lengths that news websites are going to to extract data from their readers to sell to data brokers is just a last-ditch attempt to remain profitable.
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> The fundamental problem of journalism is that the economics no longer works out.
Yes it does, from nytimes actual earning release for Q 2025:
1. The Company added approximately 450,000 net digital-only subscribers compared with the end of the third quarter of 2025, bringing the total number of subscribers to 12.78 million.
2. Total digital-only average revenue per user (“ARPU”) increased 0.7 percent year-over-year to $9.72
2025 subscription revenue was 1.950 billion dollars. Advertising was 565 million that includes 155 million dollars worth of print advertising.
Sure operating profit is only 550 million very close to the advertising revenue, but the bulk of their income is subscriptions, they could make it work if they had to. My suspicion is that if they dropped all the google ads they could have better subscription retention and conversion rates as well.
A lot of free government phone plans supplied to homeless, parolees etc in the USA only come with 3GB of transfer credit, which is usually burned up in about 3 days, leaving them without any Internet access. (or sometimes it'll drop to a throttled connection that is so slow that it can never even load Google Maps)
I remember getting punishment from parents for downloading 120MB World of Tanks update over metered home internet. Our monthly quota was 250MB. It was not that long ago, 2010.