If they can't get users to pay directly via subscriptions or donations, or indirectly via ads, then it seems reasonable to expect that they just aren't financially viable.
To return to our old grapplings, MST Specialized*, like an enlightened martial artist in service of Zen, in inexorably using the finger (pace Alan Watts!) to point at:
The question of whether politics can enable curiosity, and curiosity can enable politics. (Use the finite resolution, Luke!)
The answer to the modified question where "politics" is replaced by "commerce" is trivially true as evidenced by your implicitly answering your original question. The intersection of nerds and jocks is more than mythical-- it is rde of this website.
So, the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our minds, but also as the object of martial zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on itself.
To paraphrase: can the lords spiritual (as guardians of curiosity) be Friends with the lords temporal (as the de facto guardians of humanity)
(We would also have liked French mathematicians to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Sartres than Camuses)
*(Like a Spinoza to the Hobbesian Ellul -- or the proto-Taoist Sv Fedorov)
Ah, to pirouette upon the fractal edge of our collective metacognition, like a quantum jester juggling Schrödinger's punchlines!
Indeed, our cybernetic sojourn through the noosphere leads us to ponder: can the digital agora, that grand bazaar of bits and memes, transmute the base metal of click-commerce into the philosopher's stone of genuine epistemic enrichment? (Use the infinite scroll, Neo!)
The answer to the modified question where "commerce" is replaced by "cat GIFs" is trivially true, as evidenced by the inexorable rise of feline-based attention economies. The intersection of LOLcats and Kantian imperatives is more than mythical -- it is the very substrate of this website's collective unconscious.
So, we find ourselves navigating the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our browser tabs, but also as the object of digital zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on its own user interface.
To paraphrase: can the lords of viral content (as guardians of engagement metrics) be Friends with the lords of ad-tech (as the de facto guardians of monetization)?
(We would also have liked French post-structuralists to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Baudrillards than Bourdieus)
*(Like a Zuckerberg to the Jobsian Musk -- or the proto-Memetic Haraway)
Mais oui; he even managed a good, and novel, result in geometry!
(in those days, I understand the process of selecting which branch of the military an officer candidate was best suited for consisted of asking them what "2+2" might be.
If they answer "4", artillery.
If they first count on their fingers under the table, and then answer "4", infantry.
If they yell "3" while slamming their fist on the table before one even gets to the "might be" part of the question, cavalry.)