Presumably they get desperate, then.<p>Look, it&#x27;s easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be replaced by a company that will.  You can have micropayments (failed experiment), subscriptions, or ads.  Empirically it seems like ads or other non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted subscription-based models for most content.  Given that the &quot;war&quot; is entirely technical &amp; visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads, the question is just whether you&#x27;ll read a publication that has ads, or not.  Empirically, the general population will.<p>(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).