[cagenut]

you have the facts correct and their meaning wrong.

they're profitable because they have to be. certainly no investor is willing to eat losses to fund their negative growth curves.

they do/did so via cutting off all r&d and investment in the future first, and then by iteratively cutting and laying off from the present expenses next. profits have been extracted by riding the model into the ground.

places that have survived with paywalls do so making a tenth the money with twice the audience. they're only surviving and profitable in the sense that they won the race to the bottom, not because broad swathes of society are getting valuable information about their interests.

the decent into heavily opinion/chatter oriented content was not the cause of the decline, it was an inevitable byproduct of cutting the budget for all the writer headcount. a 20 year process of replacing 40 and 50 somethings who had health insurance and a week to work on something with 20 and 30 year olds who had a daily postcount and viewcount to hit. when you don't have time to leave your chair, all you have to talk about are your thoughts and feelings.