As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion&#x27;s international reporters.<p>Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.