Looking to reader revenue might not be the way to go after all, warns Lucia Moses in Digiday. Meanwhile, more and more publishers are moving to subscription models and away from ad revenue, much of which goes to other platforms like Facebook.

According to the article, publishers take The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian as examples. For these newsrooms, the subscription models have worked, but Moses argues that they’re special cases. She says that “the number of publishers that can pull off a scaled subscription business is likely to be small.”

Most people still think you can get your online news for free. Also, Moses points out that Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti says that “[even] for those that have been at subscriptions for a while, the portion of people who pay is still in the single digits as a percent of the entire digital readership.”

According to Michael Silberman, svp of strategy at Piano, moving to subscription models “is a big shift, and it takes a new way of thinking and executing.” It would take a new mindset, with more attention to news consumers.

Moses writes that “[at] some point, there may be saturation where publishers see their subscription growth taper off because there are so many offers out there.” For now, publishers are exploring models that include multiple revenue streams, of which subscriptions are only a portion.

Read the whole article on Digiday here.