If people are willing to pay you a premium, you don't need to capture "a majority of the news consuming market", you just need enough of those people to be profitable. Ben Thompson at Stratechery says he has a little over 2,000 paying subscribers- a tiny fraction of paying WSJ subscribers, never mind the people reading free content- and he's doing fine.

In fact, that's a known winning strategy in a lot of industries, not just journalism: let the suckers rip each other to pieces in the race to the bottom, while you deliver enough value to have fat margins. That's what Apple does, for example.