"The price is usually given in CPM (cost per mille - cost per thousand impressions), so if an ad has a cpm of 10$, one single impression is worth 0.01$ ! (The average cpm, at the time of writing, is around 1$ if you were asking)."<p>This is the fundamental core of why journalism never made the jump from newspapers to the internet, and why we have the absolute cesspool of clickbait and seo-chum of a 'news media' that we do now.<p>Its got nothing to do with ethical standards or cultural shifts or the reporters/writers/editors not wanting to do much much better. Rather, at less than a penny per pageview, the only possible way to pay even a single salary is a plummeting free-fall down to the lowest common denominator and the basest of instincts. That is why facebook was able to make a biz model of it and every other site can't.<p>($45,000/year salary + 33% biz-overhead) / ($1 CPM x 5 ads per page) = 12 million pageviews per month.<p>You cannot get 12M pageviews per month in any local city, much less the ~100M it would take to have a small staff and an editor. Hence, all the local journalists are gone.