I think the issue is that these sites don’t
generate enough income for whole teams of editors
Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested.
A great recent example is Defector Media, formed by the former staff of Deadspin (also of G/O media) who quit en masse and then formed their own employee-owned blog, Defector.com with minimal advertising and a direct reader supported revenue model. Direct reader support isn't the right model for every blog, but the larger lesson is that they were able to switch to a sustainable and spam-free format once they no longer had to pay the bills and generate some additional zillion dollars of revenue for their corporate masters.
"The company has 19 employees, each of whom own approximately 5% of the company"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defector_Media
Since their founding, they've offered annual financial updates and are doing well.
"Unfortunately the challenge isn't just "make enough enough money to pay the writers and keep the lights on." They have to do that, and then make enough additional money to keep the corporate overlords happy and interested."
Which rather well describes what just happened to DPReview. One wonders if some of the community there might be able to do something like this...
Does it? They host a ton of media content reached by most likely millions of page views with a full staff and little to no ads. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been running the site at a loss for most of its life.
A great recent example is Defector Media, formed by the former staff of Deadspin (also of G/O media) who quit en masse and then formed their own employee-owned blog, Defector.com with minimal advertising and a direct reader supported revenue model. Direct reader support isn't the right model for every blog, but the larger lesson is that they were able to switch to a sustainable and spam-free format once they no longer had to pay the bills and generate some additional zillion dollars of revenue for their corporate masters.
Since their founding, they've offered annual financial updates and are doing well. They've got something like 40K annual subscribers paying $80+ for annual subscriptions and $3.6mil in revenue as of Aug 2022.