When marketwatch and similar sites first started, they needed some serious software to create the kind of sites that could accommodate many writers, scale to high traffic loads, and provide all the necessary stats and metrics. I remember looking into one of the more popular programs 15 years ago called Vignette. You could easily spend six figures on it just getting your operation set up. And then there were ongoing licensing costs and all kinds of separate modules you could bolt on for even more money. So the barrier to entry was high and only the biggest existing players in the news space could afford to operate like that.
But then out of nowhere Wordpress comes along and allows literally anybody to start publishing and get into the news business basically for free. So the barrier to entry became nothing, and the competition in the news space increased exponentially. So now what you see is MarketWatch and some of the other older sites becoming more and more sensational to get eyeballs because the real elephant in the room is that their profits have basically collapsed. There's just no way that a substantial news room can generate loads of original articles and stories everyday and have those operations supported by Google ads. So then they start going down the road of trying to get more revenue by implementing the clickbait crap from third parties like Taboola, and that type of advertising is the bottom of the advertising barrel in my opinion. You've seen those ads plenty of times on news sites. They are always the ones at the bottom that are shown in groups of 3 to 6, with titles like "Celebs you didn't know passed away. #17 is shocking." or "Forget the iPhone 6. Here's Apple's next device."
So basically the state of the news business is terrible. Anybody can do it and there's no money in it, which leaves sites like MarketWatch and the hundreds of me-too sites in quite the predicament.
