YouTube announced:

Starting today, we’re launching a pilot program for a small group of partners that will offer paid channels on YouTube with subscription fees starting at $0.99 per month. Every channel has a 14-day free trial, and many offer discounted yearly rates. For example, Sesame Street will be offering full episodes on their paid channel when it launches. And UFC fans can see classic fights, like a full version of their first event from UFC’s new channel. You might run into more of these channels across YouTube, or look here for a list of pilot channels. Once you subscribe from a computer, you’ll be able to watch paid channels on your computer, phone, tablet and TV, and soon you’ll be able to subscribe to them from more devices.

Setting aside whether people want to watch such a limited menu of shows, YouTube has to take market share in an industry that is crowded already. These established firms have done well, if their numbers are an indication. Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) has more than 20 million subscribers. Hulu claims to have four million. Each service competes with related services from tech powerhouses Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). Satellite providers, cable systems and telecom fiber products also have live and on demand premium video.

YouTube also must wrestle with its own image among consumers. The site has tens of millions of visitors in the United States each month. But the site remains crowded with low-resolution, amateur video. Visitors are bombarded with these on YouTube’s homepage, and this content dominates the site to the point that YouTube cannot escape its current image for hosting video junk.

YouTube will continue its efforts to sell advertising, even if marketers have to be convinced that its low-quality video can offer an adequate environment for marketers. VOD does not have a chance to be a viable model.

Admittedly, Drudge is nothing like The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) digital products or CNN.com. Drudge has not attempted to put a paywall around its content, nor added hundreds of journalists as Bloomberg has. But its tremendous audience remains among the largest in the online news sector. While its model may be old, it is still unusually successful.

Online aggregation always has had a bad name among traditional media. It is considered a low-cost model to draw readers through the use of other people’s content. However, it is not particularly different from Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) news product, except that humans pick stories instead of “intelligent” technology. And intelligent technology is not professional aggregation at all, nor does it have many of the human touch advantages. Software has not replaced editorial judgment, at least not yet.

Among the oldest aggregators, which include Huffington Post, there has been a move to professional journalism. That puts Huffington Post closer to the model of The New York Times. Over time, each of these faces the ability to sell tens and eventually hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising, or to charge for content. The jury remains out on the paywall approach, and may for years.

One of the aspects about the Drudge model that cannot be argued is its ability to draw readers. By its own count, it receives about 20 million visits a day. That would put it in a league with The New York Times online and the combined website traffic of several other major media companies. And it has no print or television counterpart to help improve traffic.

One of the strengths of Drudge, at least from a financial standpoint, is that, based on almost all evaluations of the business, it has a very small staff. That means its profit margins must be large, in a world in which those of most large news sites are small or even negative.

Perhaps the most cutting criticism of Drudge is that it has an “agenda,” which in most cases is viewed as leaning right. But the same case has been made against Fox News, whether or not that charge is correct. Perceptions that most of the traditional media lean left have been part of the criticism of them for years. A political bias to news reporting has become nearly universal.

The irony about Drudge Report’s role in the media is that almost every major news outlet would like to be featured at the site. It is considered one of the most powerful sources of traffic, regardless whether these other media speak kindly of it in public.

Evaluations of the Drudge model are fewer and fewer recently. That is a shame since, among news media models, it still hold a primary place.

The New York Times reported:

The prospects for a stand-alone Time Inc. are far from certain, although Time Warner executives point out that AOL also faced bad press and double-digit declines in subscription and advertising revenue when Time Warner spun it off in 2009. Since then AOL’s return to investors has grown by 86.9 percent, according to Time Warner.

The outlook is potentially less bright for Time Inc. The publisher has experienced a 30 percent decline in revenue in the last five years. And unlike News Corporation’s newly formed publishing company, which has a benevolent chairman in Mr. Murdoch, Time Inc. and its 21 magazines face a leadership void.

And from the Wall St. Journal:

As the largest U.S. magazine publisher, Time Inc. has an enviable stable of titles, from the highly profitable People to the prestigious Time. But its operating income has dropped by roughly half over the past five years, and analysts expect revenue and profit to keep falling this year as the industry struggles to regain advertising lost to the recession and the Web.

“In this case, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” wrote Michael Nathanson, an analyst for Nomura Securities who used to work at Time Inc. “This once proud and profitable division is being punted as its business prospects look structurally challenged.”

The news that Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) will spin out Time Inc. proves just how dismayed smart executives at media companies are with magazines and newspapers. The same holds true for the News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWSA) spin-off of a business made up mostly of its print units, which includes Dow Jones. The Tribune Company, just out of Chapter 11, wants to keep its broadcast properties and jettison its newspapers, which include some of America’s largest dailies, among them the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

Those parent companies who cannot or do not want to sell have begun brutal retrenchments. Advance Publications has shut its paper in Ann Arbor, cut the publishing frequency of its newspaper in New Orleans, and probably will do the same with its properties in Cleveland and New Jersey.

Even in the part of the industry that caters to the high end of the market — a group of people and businesses that can afford subscriptions and advertising — cuts have begun. The Financial Times, among the most widely regarded business media in the world, will eliminate staff in the United Kingdom and United States. The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) continues to reduce its workforce. Dow Jones has indicated it will combine much of its news service staff with that of The Wall Street Journal.

As more and more of the print industry has to stand on its own, it will have to resort to new means to improve profits more quickly than in the past. Bottom line problems cannot be offset by the better performance of cable, TV or studio results, as they were at Time Warner, which owns CNN, HBO, and Turner and others.

For print properties that now have to stand alone, the urgency to find solutions to sales and profit problems has increased immensely.

New media, which did not spring from print or broadcast properties, do have an edge as far as total audience is concerned. ComScore reports that in January, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) sites had 186.6 million unique visitors. AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) had 111.3 million. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) sites, mostly MSN, had 169.7 million.

In aggregate, old media online does very well in audience reach. CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) sites had 82.8 million unique visitors in January. Turner, a part of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), had 79.5 million. NBC Universal, part of Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA) had 71 million. Viacom Inc. (NASDAQ: VIAB) had 69.7 million. Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI) had 50 million. Hearst had 43.1 million. The Top 50 sites by U.S audience also included Meredith Corp. (NYSE: MDP), which probably will combine with Time Inc., The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) properties, Fox Digital and The Tribune online properties.

All of this is a long way of showing that old media has extraordinary reach online, and that as traditional media outlets fail to produce the level of revenue they once did, or are no longer growing as quickly, online revenue has a chance to do better for these companies than it does.

The New York Times reported as part of its fourth-quarter results:

Digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 24.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared with 22.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. For the full year, digital advertising revenues as a percentage of total Company advertising revenues were 23.9 percent in 2012 compared with 22.5 percent in 2011.

Given that the Times had 33.6 million unique visitors online in January, which dwarfs the circulation of the company’s properties, the online revenue production is pathetic. The Times will continue to have to cut editorial staff and production costs to remain financially viable. Digital ad growth is too slow to cover the expense needs of the company.

Time Inc., another firm that produces content among the most well-regarded on the Web, will nearly disappear into Meredith, largely because it could not unlock Internet revenue.

Why is new media in such a struggle with old media companies? There is no one answer. Perhaps management has not put enough pressure on sales staffs to press online ad sales. Perhaps the companies have not been adroit enough to create content online that is of as high a quality as their traditional content. Whatever the reasons, it is not a lack of audience.

These papers are viewed by many analysts as dinosaurs, and ones that will never make money. The losses from their print editions have not been covered by online sales. At many, online sales have slowed or even reversed. That means these papers will have to resort to extraordinary efforts as they try to move toward breakeven.

If there is any precedent, huge job cuts may be one solution. Another may be to cut the papers from daily publication to three times a week. This saves printing, distribution and paper costs, but may alienate readers. There are only so many buyers of large dailies to go around, which means that with several for sale, prices for these may be pushed down.

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) recently put The Boston Globe on the market. In additional, according to Reuters:

Tribune Co has hired investment banks Evercore Partners and J.P. Morgan to assess interest in its newspaper unit, which includes The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, the company confirmed in a statement on Tuesday.

A sale of its eight major newspapers, which also include The Baltimore Sun, has been widely expected since Tribune emerged from a four-year bankruptcy process late last year.

The Globe cannot have much of a future. It has not had the kind of success that the Times itself has had selling online subscriptions and has only 28,000. Daily circulation of the paper is only 230,000. Advertising revenue is still falling, and online ads have not made up for that.

Several other large city dailies are for sale, among them the Tribune company’s Chicago Tribune and LA Times. Some national publishers have tried to solve the problem of dropping print revenue by cutting the publication of the physical paper to three or four days a week. In rare cases like Ann Arbor, parent Advance closed the paper completely. Publishers still hope to increase traffic to their websites, but the evidence that big city online visits continue to grow quickly is rare.

Someone will buy the Globe, but that does not mean it can be turned around.

The news comes just days after rumors that Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) will sell most of its publications into a venture with publisher Meredith. Time Inc. may keep Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Time. These three may be handed to media veteran Jeff Zucker, who is the new head of CNN. CNN Money is already the portal for Fortune and Money. And Sports Illustrated has relied on CNN for traffic as well, although that prized position recently was taken by the Bleacher Report.

For the sector to be completely transformed, all that is left is for Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who loaned money to the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) several years ago (and was paid back) to buy the ancient newspaper. Another American industry will have been destroyed.

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) already has decided that cable content and movies have a better future than magazines do. The Turner division of the conglomerate, founded by maverick Ted Turner, has a value that most experts believe moved beyond that of the nearly century-old Time Inc. many years ago. At least Time Warner still values the future of its ancient Warner Bros. operations. Movies, it seems, have not aged as badly as print. They at least have a bright future in the digital age.

The reason that Time Inc. and other great print properties like the flagships of New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) and Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) could be jettisoned by their parents is that none has had the hoped for success online, which might have brought enough revenue to offset troubled print operations. This observation is very old.

Although each of these media has a very large online presence, advertisers have not seen this size and scope as a reason to give them significant support. They have been elbowed aside to a large extent by the big portals, which include AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), even though these businesses face revenue growth challenges of their own. Newer media, particularly Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB), which would not have been considered media at all just a few years ago, have sucked a huge portion of online advertising out of the hands of competitors. Finally, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) not only has hurt online retailers, it also has undermined the ability of traditional media companies to build e-commerce transaction platforms of their own as a means to make money from their huge reader bases.

One of the reasons Time Inc. is an attractive target is the size of its management staff — those at the top of the pyramid in editorial, advertising sales, circulation and senior executive jobs. Meredith can cut almost all of these expensive people in a consolidation. If this works, the same cost structures could be targets of potential buyers of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times and a small number of the other old-line print media companies. Aside from the potential private buyers of these properties, there are media companies that already have built-in management structures of their own, companies like CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI).

Time Inc. is on the block. Because of that, every other famous old media brand is as well.

Many TIME websites have an uncanny similarity to their print counterparts. A quick look at Time.com proves that. Its paucity of interactive features and video make it little different from a local newspaper site — albeit with the kind of journalism that only large media companies can produce.

TIME management may believe that the company should remain above the models that are hallmarks of successful online content properties, such as the Huffington Post and Forbes. These sites use content produced by people who are not professional journalists. But those contributors often are experts in one field or another and, therefore, have something of value to add as a mix to the kind of content TIME writers have provided for decades.

The Huffington Post is hardly the only model TIME could use to increase the number of visitors to its sites who stay for long periods. Some large Web properties have levels of “membership,” marked by frequency of visits and comments. (Some stories at TIME sites do not have any comments at all.) These “members” are similar to the “trusted” e-commerce” partners of Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). It is hard to say how this kind of engagement would hurt the quality of TIME journalism. Loyalty to a product is not a mark of a product declining in value.

TIME has done very little to experiment with paywalls. If the demand for People.com is anywhere close to the demand for its print content, it would seem there is at least a reasonable chance that visitors would pay for much online content. That might cut down on pages available to advertisers. But those pages sometimes carry ads for Subway (at Sports Illustrated) and Choice Hotels, which probably do not pay huge premiums for to be on those pages.

There will be another round of layoffs at TIME, maybe next year or the year after. The company has not done enough to build its online audiences and demonstrate that they can be a growing source of revenue, either through better engagement, whether that drives higher quality ads, or readers who are willing to pay for some of what they want to see. Or, maybe TIME management has experimented with every one of the best features of its competition and found that not a single one of them works. But that is unlikely.

Douglas A. McIntyre worked for TIME Inc. from 1977 to 1981, and wrote for Time.com in 2008.