Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).

But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.

The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.

Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer "good" companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and...

In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and "clickbait" articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.

So it is very much worth looking in to more permissive blocklists and even permitlists. Block tracking cookies because fuck that shit. But permit sites that you "trust" to have reasonable ads and look in to finer grain blocklists that still allow the actual ads to be displayed, even if they aren't the ones based on Amazon figuring out you have a foot fetish.

I wouldn't visit these sites if you paid me. Much less forced me to watch ads.

Just disable JS if you are going to read texts.

I wonder which content blocker you're using, because with uBlock Origin (with a fairly aggressive config and custom blocklists) I do not get that "disable adblock" pop up.

Not like I'd visit this site at all, I just tried to see if I could create a uBO filter for you to remove the paywall.

Read as giving them ad revenue allows them to write without doing sponsored articles

Free speech doesn't mean a compelled audience.

Just because you can say it doesn't mean I have to listen.

Reminds me of Microsoft's "1,000,000 PCs can't be wrong" or whatever it was when they started pushing windows 10 to 7 users

If you’re trying to get paid based one someone’s views or clicks, it’s not free.

wow, the balls of the folk who came up with this 🤡

Free speech also entails how willingly you are to put that speech out there. If you want to cover it with a paywall of any sort, you are most welcome to do that. Keep in mind that free speech and its actions also have consequences. If your content is good enough, people might pay to see it. Free market and all that.

Free speech for corporations and advertisers. For users is the paywall as adblocker. For this screenshot, Memes is a better place.

Ummm... That's the wrong freedom for them to be trying to invoke. They have their own. It's called Freedom of the Press. But they don't seem to want to invoke that one when they know it is bullshit.

This might be a mildly infuriating moment

Advertisements are pretty specifically not free.