The ‘Google is an advertising company’ is said often on HN. I agree to some extent but, doesn’t that imply that every newspaper company is also just an advertising company? Google solves a real problem and this works well, for them, with an advertising based revenue model. Do they compromise their search to that end? Probably. Do newspapers? Hopefully not, but maybe. To me, that doesn’t make them advertising companies. Apologies if this is pedantic.
Of course they are. Page ads are probably as old as print. Most reviews are ads. Travel sections are ads. There are real estate sections, and classifieds as well. Perhaps the most honest reporting is found in the local sports section.
Subscriptions for the “modern newspaper” did not pay the bills, but were proof that people were actually reading the newspaper.
Prior to that there were papers which did indeed make their money from subscriptions. But their content was different as well: explicitly ideological and argumentative. The NYT or Wapo idea of neutral journalism was a later development.
