What on Earth is going on? There are at least three major trends contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now: News publishers have to get better at making money outside of advertising.

1. There are too many publishers and not enough ad money.

Here is the briefest possible history of attention and advertising in the 21st century—they have both flowed from desktops to mobile devices and from publishers to platforms. In 2016, 90 percent of websites reported that unique visitors on mobile devices had eclipsed desktop; and 90 percent of the growth in digital advertising came from just two companies, Google and Facebook.

Facebook and Google’s dominance stems from one of the great arbitrages in media history. Publishers still bear the cost of reporting, analyzing, and, well, publishing the news. Facebook and Google cinch the bloated web into the straitjacket of vertical content known as results pages and feeds. In the process, they collect unparalleled information about the interests and aspirations of their users and profit from their roles as digital gatekeepers. While some have compared Facebook and Google to cable companies distributing television shows, one difference is critical: TV distributors pay networks an “affiliate fee” for their entertainment, while Facebook and Google owe no such gratuity for the vast majority of its content. In 2017, Google and Facebook are projected to account for about 61 percent combined of the U.S. digital ad market. No other company comes even close.

This reality would be troubling even if online publishing were a static business. But employment in “internet publishing and broadcast,” the government’s best approximation for online media, has grown by more than 100,000 people in the last decade. As a result, there are too many writers and publications saying the exact same thing—oops, Josh Marshall at TPM already said that—competing for a limited supply of advertising. As a result, digital media’s appetite for ads has grown faster than the digital-ad pie.

This is not the same as saying that publishers should just give up on advertising. Without it, The Atlantic might not exist. Neither would most newspapers.* Advertising has been a critical feature of a healthy news business for at least 150 years, since Benjamin Day invented the penny press, and its centrality to the news business isn’t disappearing, just dissipating.

2. Media companies accepted VC money. Now they’re accepting VC reality.

In many ways, the 2017 correction in digital media is a perfectly normal and predictable outcome of digital media becoming an investment category for venture capitalists. As a rule, the vast majority of VC investments fail. So the failure of several VC-backed digital-media companies isn’t an existential shock so much as a mathematical inevitability.