I'm currently contracting for a rather large news outlet and I had a talk with the VP of Engineering about why every media outlet is like this and he shed some

I'm currently contracting for a rather large news outlet and I had a talk with the VP of Engineering about why every media outlet is like this and he shed some light on me. The print edition is losing money for them and business decided to start giving them away for free to increase brand awareness. The paywalled stuff is making them modest revenue, definitely not enough to make a living for now but they're still experimenting with the model. The ads and user tracking is where the real money is. The bidding ad network stuff is okayish, but it seems the big money is in the sponsored articles and in skins (custom stylesheet designed for a specific brand). The former two seem to make even seven digit figures per contract for them. Looking at the backlog and their style of organizing work you can obviously tell that the users actually visiting the site are treated as second hand citizens while their partners are kings. This leads me to the conclusion that this is what people might not really want, but it's what they got used to. Finding a sustainable high quality news media business model is an interesting problem worthy of a startup I'd say.