They don't need paid subscribers. Physical papers and tv have been supported by ads without tracking for decades. Companies pay for space or time.
Internet allowed advertisers to track so now we have this BS. They had many years to fix this. But tracking is the business of many companies like google and facebook. Now lot of people uses ad blocker and it's increasing.
The price an advertiser pays to be a full page ad in the NYTimes and printed with the paper is on the order of $150,000, the price an advertiser pays to obscure your entire screen with an ad is as little as $1.00.
What you're missing is that advertising rates for television and print are several decimal orders higher than the rates for internet advertising. Why that is is more complicated than you might guess, but the economics of "printing" a newspaper by sending you the text is a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than running a printing press. Between those two realities a lot of news web sites are being crushed.
If 600,000 [0] people see that $150,000 ad, the advertiser has paid $4 per impression. At $1 CPM, 600k impressions is $60,000, but as you said this cost is at the lowest end. An ad that obscures your entire screen might cost as much as $8 CPM or more [1] and now buying the newspaper ad is sounding like a better deal.
Internet allowed advertisers to track so now we have this BS. They had many years to fix this. But tracking is the business of many companies like google and facebook. Now lot of people uses ad blocker and it's increasing.