The money has to come from somewhere.

Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.

At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...