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News websites are failing every day. Even Buzzfeed had big layoffs a few months ago. If your revenue model relies on making your website increasingly less user-friendly, it might have kept your head above water for longer than some competitors, but it can't be sustainable.

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The real reason they are failing is not user-unfriendliness or tracking though. It's the intense competition and the broadening of the publisher base by 1000x with the advent of the internet, and the natural supply-demand adjustment to very low rates of return from advertising. This leads them to increase the advertising load in order to make ends meet, hence using more trackers.

The successful newspapers appear to enforce strict paywalls. I pay for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times because their content and analysis is good and original. (They also have decent events from time to time.)

The free-news model almost requires aggressive tracking, which I agree is unsustainable.

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