Reading up on One Big Union. The Wikipedia article mentions that at the end of its days it was generating income via a lottery in its bulletin. This gave me an idea.

In the interest of diversifying news media, strengthening journalistic practices and integrity, creating non-partisan news coverage, and giving Canadian works a national outlet for publishing, I would like to start an online newspaper. However, I would like to limit ads since I find them distasteful at best and compromising at worst. This leaves subscription income and one-off purchases as the main revenue sources.

The issue with this is that people don’t purchase news media anymore. They either look at an ad-supported website or they wait for someone else to buy a paywalled article and copypaste it somewhere. So the issue with a non-ad-supported model is that there’s no incentive to buy. Hence, a lottery a la a 50/50 draw or some such. This would give people incentive to buy, increasing the circulation of the newspaper. So I’m hoping someone might be able to provide some insight into the matter.