With advertising-based journalism, you measure engagement by clicks - which is bad because it gives us clickbait. You can argue about whether there is clickbait in music and video, but we know that clickbait in journalism is definitely a problem.
In an ideal world, there would be a simple measure of how good/relevant/interesting/informative a news or opinion article is. I don't think anyone has discovered that yet. To my mind, this is the core problem. If we can solve "how to measure objective quality in journalism", then we can apply all sorts of business models to it. All the current business models fall short not because the model is inherently flawed, but because they reward bad journalism. If how much an advert paid the publisher was linked to how good the article was, then we'd have good journalism. As it is now, we reward clickbait-y high-volume low-quality journalism, so that's what we get.