Rather they want you to pay for a subscription to read their articles than not read them. Not everyone can afford $200 a year for a subscription to the WSJ. They are still using a newspaper business model that is based on subscribers rather than an Internet website business model of free with advertising.

Some sites refuse to serve content if an adblocker is installed.

So there is a lot of subscription models with some websites that try to force people to pay for articles. It is not that they don't want you to read, they want you to pay to read.