Even though advertising revenue makes a significant chunk of their revenues, they are pushing for "digital subscription" more and more. Digital subscriptions seems to have become their main source of revenue now.

But that doesn't negate the fact that they had leveraged ads to get the significant audience that content creators would care about. And my point still holds in the case of NYT.

The case with OTT services, like Netflix, is different here. They either already had, or bought, a lot of content that they know is in demand from the box office history. They then focus on attracting audience to that content. And once they have the audience, they can then attract creators to create exclusive movies and shows for their platform.

Maybe a model like that could be applied at other places too (although, I am not able to imagine this in a social networking website).