The fact that random internet posters think they know more about the P&L of media companies than the executives running the organizations is endlessly entertaining.

Yes, it's strange that any business manages not to make money, because obviously the people running them are the best people making the best decisions, because in the best possible world, who else could they be?

> random internet posters

This is solipsism. Just because people are random to you doesn't mean they're random to themselves. You could literally be arguing with an executive of the company that was overruled, but you're seeing the world as full of NPCs.

You may be right but, then again, organizations do go out of business every day and those reasons are usually that they were persisting with a business model that most other sane people thought was doomed to fail.

It's some sort of cyclical recurrence on HN. Everyone is so certain of how to solve/fix it, except they've never worked in media :)

I know about not coming back to a website that doesn't let me read its content.

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.

DAU's are increased most efficiently with spammy clickbait, hence the problem of the free content model.