So your armchair critique of the entire news industry overly simplifies a complicated problem. >> DAUs === money. DAUs may equal money but usually not enough.

So your armchair critique of the entire news industry overly simplifies a complicated problem. >> DAUs === money. DAUs may equal money but usually not enough. It's not smart for any business to have only a single source of revenue (ads). The dependency on ad revenue as the primary source of income has been highly damaging for news orgs in the past. Even with steady traffic your ad revenue can fluctuate based on so many factors (health of external ad budgets in a given year or with big clients, recessions, changes in CPMs in programatic advertising, and host of others). Subscriptions was the way to build a steady and reliable revenue stream while weathering the unpredictable ad side. Users complain of crappy ads covering the content, and auto-playing video, and crap Taboola/Outbrain modules everywhere. Thats what usually happens when a media org depends on wholly ads. It is not a simple as you think it is.