[Samon]

Exactly this. I work for one such large multinational news corporation, and its all about ads and analytics.

On the analytics front, we are measuring and reporting on pages and articles at a number of levels, from audience metrics around demographics, device type, time-of-day, time-on-page, scrolling behaviour, etc to the actual articles themselves, the section/category, even the individual journalist. We have real-time reporting and statistics on the 'performance' of any article, journalist, section, etc.

Tracking and measuring user behaviour is largely performed using a number of cookies.