I don't think advertising for "a paper" will ever be as lucrative as the old paper days, because it's too easy to drift over to the billion other sites on the web.<p>The old paper days allowed for virtual monopolies because it was physically inconvenient to have more than three or four papers at hand, and most people only had one. It was easier to convince an advertiser that a reader was going to at least glance through every section and be exposed to the ads.<p>These days I never read a news outlet's site all the way through[1], not in the way I used to sit on the floor on Sunday with paper and coffee. A news outlet has at most two or three articles' chance at getting my eyes to glide over an advertisement. I will never see 99% of what's on a site before I move on to some other site. Google is the only one making money this way.<p>[1] Except for Hacker News. I think aggregation points the way to where the money is in the future, both aggregation of content and aggregation of ads.