Here's the thing. If you tell me traditional print newspapers are dying because of falling subscription and display ad numbers, I get it. But online news porta

Here's the thing. If you tell me traditional print newspapers are dying because of falling subscription and display ad numbers, I get it. But online news portals laying off is, in my opinion, more of a sign of incompetence and less of falling subscriptions. These companies like HuffPo and BuzzFeed came around when the problems facing traditional newspapers were clear as day. Indeed, they directly contributed to the problem of falling subscription of newspapers with their chase for eyeballs as probably their sole metric for success. The onus lied on them to scale their business as their revenue scaled. Don't hire expensive offices and hundreds of people just to churn out listicles and a little bit of journalism a la Buzzfeed. Grow with the growth in your revenue and metric growth in key areas. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the news industry establishment of Buzzfeed so they can't cry of falling subscription. Regardless of amount of VC money you receive, businesses should have profitability and sustainability in mind from day one instead of "let's build they will come". Of course chasing growth with revenue taking a backseat worked for Google or Facebook but for every Facebook/Google, there are thousands of companies, employee lives and millions of dollars wasted on such an unsustainable model.