I've been wondering whether we can really boil it down to profit motive, so I did a quick search. Apparently we can... "Between early 2017 and November 2020, The Times’ digital circulation grew from about 2 million to more than 7 million...:

"Growth has been equally impressive at The Post — from perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 in early 2016, according to an estimate by the newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor, to 1 million at the end of 2017, to 3 million in November 2020, Axios reported..."