> No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily blocked ad versions Sure they did. The market 100% absolutely drove papers

> No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily blocked ad versions Sure they did. The market 100% absolutely drove papers to transition to digital ads. If everyone in an industry makes the same change, how can you argue that said change wasn’t demanded by the market? To argue that they got lazy completely ignores the economic forces that have motivated print publications over the last 30 years. Scared? Sure. Lazy? Spend some time in a newsroom and see for yourself how desperate they are. Newspapers used to have two primary sources of income: subscriptions and advertising. Subscriptions brought in pretty stable income while advertising brought in higher margins with increased variability. The two were also deeply linked: advertising rates were set largely on the amount of reach that a paper had through its distribution. Papers with higher distribution could command higher advertising fees. Then the internet came along and hollowed out the subscription base for publications around the country. Income streams for papers decreased and became less stable at the same time. As subscriptions dropped, so did the paper’s ability to advertise. To supplement income shortfalls and try to figure out how to exists in the digital age, papers started adapting their business models for the internet. They saw decades of declining print advertising revenues, driven largely by a shift towards cheap and targeted online advertising.