The ads based business model is deeply flawed and resulting in the ending of democracy. You need to pay, but the issue rn is the flawed nature of paying and digital currency. Subscriptions are garbage. I should be able to pay for only the product I am interested in and then the value should be on par with the past.
A newspaper was pocket change and most of that was for materials and labor involved with the physical medium. You were only paying a few cents for all of the actual content of the newspaper.
Likewise now, I should be able to use something like monero to pay $0.05 to see and read any article. I don't get to save it or rights to it or whatnot. I can screenshot it for my personal use or just pay again to see it next time. This should have no tracking whatsoever, no subscription, no login, no fingerprinting. It is a straight forward transaction for a product at a fair price. No institution has a right to be a lazy burden with some repeating subscription. If they cannot churn value on this type of market, they don't belong in the business in the first place.
All ads are existing in a market where the base transactions are often valued in tiny fractions of a cent, yet when that same product is presented to the public it is orders of magnitude more expensive. This is criminal market manipulation. I should be valued the same as a stalkerware data victim viewing a page as I am when paying for the same view/impression. The right to pay my way out of digital slavery and extortion markets costs orders of magnitude more than the privateers pay for the means to extort and manipulate me. That is a gross violation of fundamental human rights. The consequence of decades of this disparity has been the erosion of all reliable media sources. This was a decades long soft coup on democracy and it has been very successful. A well informed and balanced citizen is the foundation of democracy.