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.
Re:Amazon Reports Surge in Profit
by manigandham on Monday May 02, 2016 @10:26AM
(#11611604)
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.
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...