# What does news without ads cost, and who pays for it? > Every news source has a payer, and most readers never check which one. A few quick checks show who funds any source and what that payer wants from you. Source: https://informed.now/blog/news-without-ads By Kira Shishkin · November 12, 2026 · News Industry **Summary:** News without ads costs money, and someone always pays the bill: The reader, a donor, or the public. The payer shapes what a newsroom makes, so the most useful question to ask about any news source is who funds it. Every newsroom answers to whoever covers its costs. When advertisers pay, the product being sold is your attention, and a page earns more the longer it holds you and the more often it pulls you back. When readers pay, a newsroom earns its money by being worth the next renewal. Those are 2 different jobs, and they produce 2 different kinds of news. Ad-free news exists in plenty of forms. It just moves the bill somewhere you can see it. ### Who pays for the news you read now? Advertising carried American newspapers for most of the last century, and then the money left. US newspaper ad revenue peaked at $49.4 billion in 2005 and fell to an estimated $9.8 billion by 2022, a drop of 80%, according to the [fact sheet](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/) on newspapers that Pew Research Center published in 2023. Digital ads made up 48% of that 2022 total. In the same year, circulation revenue, the money readers pay for subscriptions and single copies, came to an estimated $11.6 billion, more than the industry took in from ads. Readers now cover more of the newspaper bill than advertisers do, yet most people pay nothing and assume someone else has the bill handled. In a [2024 survey](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2024/05/07/americans-changing-relationship-with-local-news/) of 5,146 US adults, Pew found that 15% had paid or given money to any local news source in the past year, while 63% believed their local outlets were doing well financially. Few readers pay online, either. The Reuters Institute's [Digital News Report](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025/dnr-executive-summary) for 2025 found that 18% of people across 20 richer countries paid for online news in the past year, the same share as the year before. The US sat at 20%, and Norway led at 42%. Subscriptions have more than doubled over a decade, and the report says they now look to have hit a ceiling. ### What do ads do to the news? An ad-funded page gets paid per view, and payment per view explains a lot of what readers dislike about the news. A headline that earns a click is worth more than a headline that describes the article accurately, and that price gap keeps [clickbait](https://informed.now/blog/what-is-clickbait) alive through every redesign. A post that makes you angry keeps you scrolling and sharing, so [rage bait](https://informed.now/blog/what-is-rage-bait) shows up next to serious reporting. An alert that pulls you back to the app is worth money even when nothing changed. The page itself fills with slots, autoplay video, and "recommended for you" rails, because each one is another chance to sell a view. We'd bet the incentive shows up more in the packaging than in the reporting. A careful reporter can file an accurate article that then gets a misleading headline, a pile of ads, and a push alert timed for the commute home. The facts survive the trip, while the reader spends the evening chasing alerts and closing ads wrapped around those facts. ### What does news without ads cost? Every model that drops ads replaces them with another payer, and each payer pulls in its own direction. Subscribers want a reason to renew, so subscription newsrooms chase depth, exclusives, and habits that bring the same readers back. Members and donors fund newsrooms they believe in. Their money keeps pages open to everyone but makes the newsroom answer to the people writing the checks. Foundations pay for coverage of the subjects they care about. Public funding pays for broad coverage and invites a fight over politics every budget season. None of those payers is neutral. Each one is visible, though, and a visible payer is easier to judge than a hidden one. With ads, the bill arrives as minutes of your attention, and most readers never add it up. We laid out that hidden price for a [free app](https://informed.now/blog/free-news-app) in an earlier post. ### Doesn't a paywall shut out the people who need news most? The strongest case for ads is that they keep news free at the door. If 18% of people pay for online news, 82% don't, and ad-funded pages are what that majority reads. Paywalls risk a split where people who can pay get careful reporting while everyone else gets whatever spreads for free, and misleading content never charges a subscription. That objection is right, and we can't fully answer it. Advertising paid for decades of serious reporting, and a world with only paid news would leave a lot of people less informed than they are now. The choice is wider than paywall or ads, though. Donation-funded newsrooms keep every article open. Many public libraries give cardholders free digital access to paid newspapers. Some publishers lifted their paywalls for pandemic coverage in 2020. And for an individual reader, the decision that matters most is knowing what each free page asks for in return, then choosing on purpose. ### How do you tell who pays for a news source? You can check any source in a few minutes, with no special tools: 1. **Find the money.** Read the About, funding, or "support us" page. Look for subscribers, members, donors, owners, and ad sales. US nonprofit newsrooms file a public tax return, [Form 990](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-series-downloads), that lists where their revenue comes from. 2. **Count the slots.** Open one article and count the ads, autoplay videos, and recommendation rails before the last paragraph. A page with 10 interruptions is selling something other than the article. 3. **Test the headline.** Read the headline, then the first paragraph. If the headline promises more than the paragraph delivers, the headline was written for clicks. 4. **Watch the ending.** Notice what the page asks for when you finish: Another click, a share, an alert, or nothing at all. 5. **Pay for one.** Pick the source you read most and subscribe or donate, if you can. Paying for one source changes who that newsroom works for in your life, even if everything else stays free. The 5 checks run as well on a Sunday paper as on a website: The masthead names the owner, and the ad pages are easy to count. ### What does news without ads look like in practice? We built [informed.now](https://informed.now) around those checks. It's one text every weekday morning with 6 news summaries, picked with one transparent filter and carrying no ads. The brief ends when the news ends, so there's no feed to scroll and no reason to keep you reading past the last summary. Every source of news has a payer, and the payer decides what the page wants from you. Ads hide the bill inside your attention. A subscription, a donation, or a public budget puts the bill where you can read it, and once you can read the bill, you know who the newsroom works for.