You can see why big newspaper managers – say Mark Thompson at the New York Times – grow indignant when “cynical”, “money-grasping” adblocking businesses demand money from papers in return for leaving their ads unblocked. That’s “unsavoury” with a Godfather twist. But brows may furrow a little when Thompson tells conference audiences that he’s preparing to sell readers a “higher-tier” ad-free digital package himself.
“We do want to offer all of our users as much choice as we can, and we recognise that there are some users – both subscribers and non-subscribers – who would prefer to have an ad-free experience.” Which would seem to mean that, if you pay us more, we’ll block the ads for you ourselves.
One step extra along this road and Mark will have invented something fantastically revolutionary in American media life. What, back in his old job as director general at the BBC, we used to call a licence fee.
