Good points. Looking at it without considering the emotion of the subject matter, they are courting some short term profit, but at the expense of some long term readership. Strikes me as fairly high time preference stuff. Bitcoiners have pretty long memories.

The media model is pretty screwed nowadays, so I have a slight bit of sympathy to their predicament. As you allude to, it will be interesting to see if Bitcoin can help change it. All our time is scarce; perhaps in the future people will have more respect for the value of their own time hence more willing to pay for quality content without being constantly advertised to.