There's no profit in news; there's profit in selling information of users. More cookies equals more tracking which gathers more info to sell.
Money I guess. I'd be interested in seeing a blog post analyzing how all this stuff gets used. For instance looking at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/uk</a> I can see hundreds of cookies against their site and loads of associated advertisers. Most of the items are a load of hashes and ids etc so how does all this stuff get used in reality and what are they actually storing - is it just a journey of clicks on that page etc?
Ads. It's hard to make money in online news, so lots of sites feel the need to plaster ads all over the page. Every ad is going to bring along its own trackers to gather information on users but also to make sure the site is meeting guaranteed minimums for viewability.<p>Analytics. At a minimum, there's going to be Google Analytics but there might be some in-house tracking tool or some kind of audience statistics package too.<p>Paywalls need to make sure you haven't met the limit.<p>A/B tests on headlines, content, and even styling mean remembering which test group you fall into.