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Keep the free one, sell the others just below market price (say, 104$). Then, buy more 4th-free-books. Again, keep the free ones etc etc ad nauseam. You are going to be so rich! So much so, you can buy X, and on a whim call it Twitter, just because you will be filthy rich and can afford such futility!
Upvoted for unpopular and for making clear, legitimate points in favour.
That said, I partially agree. Serving content costs money, as does investigating, reporting and writing it. Paywalls are the Black Death of the Internet, so what else remains? A creator fee as provided by Brave in the past was nice but didn’t work. Donations are scarce, small and unreliable. Advertising has proven to work well for old school newspapers and magazines, so it’s an understandable choice.
However, from advertising it escalated extremely quickly into the Stasi-inspired tracking-snooping-profiling fuckfest it has become, not taking into account the disgusting ad-to-content ratio, pop-ups, pop-overs and yes, pop-unders, flashing banners, animated swf banners and the abuse of the ad markets by malware and espionage groups.
And I too, Gandalf, I was there, 3000 years ago, when my wizard wrote the OSF1 binaries on the securely aligned platters of oulde.