This is unrelated. Paywalling != tracking.

If it wouldn't work, then I'd see no ads in my paper-based iX subscription, yet it is full of ads even though I'm paying for that paper.

But the paper has the benefit that the ads I see there don't collect information on me. This is what I want the internet to be.

Ads OK, but no tracking of me if I don't want it (which I express via cookies when in a browser).

Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.

> This is unrelated

It's not. Tracking leads to better targeting which leads to higher conversion ratios and overall higher "Cost Per 1000 Impressions" (CPM).

If you simply do "contextual" targeting, so targeting based on the page content, your CPM will go down and and the publisher will lose money.

> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article

Depends on the company. News media publishers use the same system but are usually barely profitable if at all.

> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.

The EU Court of Law decided that offering a subscription or mandate for cookies to be enabled is not legal as an offer. So the transactional nature you propose is currently not allowed. What is allowed is a grey area which has yet to be explored.

There are unpaid sites without ads.

Older folks might remember that there were a lot of people willing to make content free, just out of personal enthusiasm, and that this content was actually a lot higher quality than that pumped out by capitalist motivation.

So, actually, users and sites both had what they wanted, just not corporations.

I agree and these people still exist.

However not all content can be produced this way, news or sports coverage would be an example.

You get faster and better news coverage from random people on social media than news corporations these days.

Although I agree that news media quality is not always great (really depends from one publisher to another), I would not really qualify random people on Twitter as "news coverage".

Especially given how likely it is that bots are or will soon be rampant.