The OP is accurate—but it's missing two more critical reasons why newspapers are dying. 1) Ad fraud. It reduces the value of advertising. https://www.mediapost

The OP is accurate—but it's missing two more critical reasons why newspapers are dying. 1) Ad fraud. It reduces the value of advertising. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advertisers-lose-billions-of-dollars-to-ad-fraud.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/328730/advert... "The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates online ad fraud costs advertisers $8.2 billion annually." And I've heard numbers alleged much higher; as much as 30% of revenue for a news site... 2) User tracking. If you have the choice of paying X for an ad for a user on the NYT site, or (1/3)X for the same user on some clickbait site, which do you do? (particularly as an advertising middleman attempting to maximize impressions per $). This type of arbitrage—sometimes unwittingly coming from user data from the higher quality sites—could significantly reduce their revenue making them unprofitable.