So... is it possible to make a truly 'great' gaming news site?

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By removing the advertising model altogether?

So in other words, access to content would be through subscriptions, like an old school magazine or a modern service like Netflix?

Because I've been considering the idea for my own upcoming general games site, and I'm thinking it could fix quite a few issues that modern gaming journalism tends to have.

For example, we could tell the PR people to sod off, since we wouldn't need any review copies or free games or event tickets to get access to the titles. We'd avoid clickbait and other crap, since we wouldn't need to try and appeal to the BuzzFeed style 'moron' crowd for easy views and ad revenue. And I'd be able to avoid controveries like GamerGate, since neither baiting the audience nor getting involved with developers would be reasonable (and if the audience got annoyed, they'd just stop paying and let me go broke).

So yeah, could a truly great gaming site be made with a subscription model for much of the content? Would anyone actually ever pay for gaming related content on the internet?
 
Well, it is true the internet ad revenue model generally leads to lower quality. Recently in France, there was a controversy over journalism ethics (NOT GAMERGATE) and the PC gaming paper magazine Canard PC is frequently given as an exemple à suivre, since being one of the few paper magazine left, it funds itself and does not have to accept publisher bribes in exchange of exclusivity or run clickbait to get ad money.

Really though, running a viable subscription-based gaming website is like maintaining a subscription-based MMO in 2015: Difficult : p.
 
I suppose if it really is the best some people would pay for it, but it doesn't seem like it'd make much money in my opinion. People will deal with the trash if it's free (why Candy Crush is doing better than Bejeweled) or just use adblock. Then again, I'm really not an expert on people so I wouldn't know.
 
Well, I'm still planning to go ahead with the paid content part of my upcoming gaming site. If it does succeed, that could make me a lot of money.

The only problem is that I need to get everything right in terms of content and functionality and design. And make the thing in such a way that corruption is virtually impossible.
 
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