Newsletters can be incredibly profitable for media organizations because it 1) gets people to return to your content on a regular basis 2) can allow for more targeted advertising

I personally hate this trend, but almost everybody's doing it these days

and (3) are vastly cheaper than other forms of advertising since they are not paying any platform provider for the ads.

Plenty of high budget websites have this, and often they come back if you dismiss them. I would rather the site just deny me up front.