Serve first-party ads that integrate well with your content, and establish direct relationships with your advertisers... same as print has done for over a century.

This does not scale and has been proven over and over again. Print never made much money and they had both subscriptions and advertising together to help.

That's pretty much bullocks... Print media costs massively more for publishing costs vs. online publishing. Same wrt television, both of which handle upwards of millions of customers every day just fine.

I'm not sure what point you've made.

Print media does have more costs, but its advertising also costs more. Print also has subscriptions/purchases to actually get the material in addition to the advertising it contained so they have 2 revenue streams, allowing the advertising to be simpler and not carry the entire cost. And it still wasn't a great business model with many outlets just breaking even.

Regardless, there were never "millions" of advertisers or publishers like we have in digital which is why selling direct does not work, unless you only want the top 1% of sites to make any money...

NYT within the past year is claiming 2 million subscribers... now some of those may be online only... but there's every bit of potential they could setup a first party ad system.

They do, it's called native advertising. It still doesn't scale for the 100s of millions of pageviews they get.

And that's the biggest and best publisher there is, which goes back to what I last said: even if the high-end pubs do it, mid-tier and long-tail pubs definitely couldn't handle 1st party ad serving and thus would not be able to make any money.