<i>&gt;Plenty of people pay for the ...</i><p>It is true that many pay for digital subscriptions but I did not interpret the <i>&quot;will people pay for it?&quot;</i> as just a non-zero number of subscribers.<p>Instead, <i>&quot;will people pay for it?&quot;</i> is often interpreted as shorthand for &quot;would <i>enough</i> people pay <i>enough</i> money to make it economically viable?&quot;  (E.g. good salaries for journalists, strong profits for the publisher, etc.)<p>Yes, those websites you mentioned are attracting paying subscribers to avoid paywalls but as far as I can tell, <i>nobody</i> is making significant profits from it.  For example, NYT digital subscriptions are growing -- and ad revenue from online is growing -- but the profits (if any) are not replacing the lost profits from traditional print ads.  For online subscriptions, many publishers are losing money or barely breaking even.  No newspaper including NYT has solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought.  So far, the answer to <i>&quot;will people pay for it?&quot;</i> appears to be <i>&quot;no&quot;</i>.<p>From what I can tell, the kind of publishing that works very well on subscriptions is industry-specific for a specialized audience.  For example, the NationalJournal (costs $7000 to $25000) for following blow-by-blow legislation in Washington DC or Gartner Group (~$20k&#x2F;yr) for business analysis news.  On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is replicated on too many other free sources.  As a result, mainstream publishing will always depend more on heavy-handed advertising rather than subscriptions for the majority of revenue.