You know, that would actually be the funniest possible concept if it actually turned out to be true. We discover the whole wild kingdom is like pulling a toy story on us. All animals are sentient, Our dogs actually speak perfect english.
It’s much like HHGTTG said about dolphins.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
I mean in fairness, the models are the failures. Say you run a journalism site. You pay a good salary for the journalist, Then obviously they need researchers, maybe a legal expert to look over and make sure none of that opens you up to lawsuits etc… Then you’ve also got at least a bit of bandwidth etc…
So now you’ve got to weigh your options of which evil you need to actually make all those payments. Untargetted ads aren’t even going to come close to breaking even. Everyone’s going to riot and boycott if you dare to paywall it. tracking and targetted ads are also evil of course.
Now obviously there are some evils that decide "OK lets skip the research, lets let an AI write the articles, lets ramp up the tracking… and then talk about if we can feasibly use a paywall without losing everyone.
But, even the most ethical company on earth has to make some choices, and there’s a pretty set amount of evils necessary just to break even, and the worse part is, bringing costs down is also a pretty big evil as, most of those costs are what make it worth reading at all.