The recent Marissa Mayer piece in Medium [1] made much of the fact that her big accomplishment so far was transitioning from the old dying Banner ads model to a mobile/video/social/fake content friendly model.
Also consider this bit from buzzfeed [2] which I first saw from stratechery's great article [3] on them.
The banner ad, whose decline Farhad Manjoo recently celebrated, was also born during this era and created a business model in which clicks are tied directly to dollars — something many people assume is still how all online publishers make their money. But BuzzFeed has never sold a banner, and I couldn't even tell you how many monthly page views we get. And so our business model at least moderates that incentive to drag every last click out of our audience.
[1] https://medium.com/backchannel/marissa-mayer-has-completed-s...
[2] http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clic...
[3] http://stratechery.com/2015/buzzfeed-important-news-organiza...
Instead, we opted to take the road less traveled — subscription revenues. [1]
Which still did not bring in enough revenue.
[1] https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-u...