Because there&#x27;s more to success than simply the amount of people who click on your ads. They say 20% of their readers block ads, I would say that it&#x27;s fair to assume that of those 20% maybe 5% would be willing to pay over $50 a year for reading their content or whitelist them, probably a smaller percentage of users will simply update their adblocking mechanism to keep browsing unbothered. Everyone else of those will simply stop visiting them. That&#x27;s a possible 15% traffic drop.<p>It may not be traffic that gave them money directly like you pointed out but it&#x27;s traffic from a fairly active crowd in social media, it&#x27;s the people who link articles to them on places like our own HN, Twitter, &#x2F;. or any number of other places. This effect leads to a drop in number of visitors who see ads which is a revenue drop.<p>I do like the subscription model (I&#x27;d like it better if it was a Freemium subscription model but alas it isn&#x27;t), but I agree with the OP in believing that they&#x27;ll backpedal this change before the end of the year.