I worked for a few years in a legacy media company as we tried to “invent the future of digital publishing”. The business was pretty wedded to advertising, in a similar kind of way that many of our politicians are wedded to coal and oil.
There are alternative models, some of them work reasonably well, some of them are arguably non-capitalist (eg the Guardian, the ABC)
In the end, this particular company opted for “sell to a bigger corporation” as their solution, which then led to doubling-down on advertising as revenue, and (imho) a further decline in the quality of news reporting.