How online newspapers leverage subdomain leasing to dominate the coupon industry?

You may have observed that a number of successful domains were operating under a subdomain or subfolder of another brand in the coupon industry:

For instance:

This is an example of a subdomain leasing, where a subdomain is leased to a third-party and ran independently.

Why do online newspaper lease their subdomains?

Some years ago, this industry was running on an advertising-only business model. With radio and TV, it was one of the most widespread ways of marketing a product or a brand.

Today, the reality is very different: the market share of printed advertising has fallen dramatically and online advertising is mainly done on Google, Facebook and Amazon, hence online newspapers are getting a smaller piece of the advertising pie than before. Way less.

They needed to find alternative streams of income, and subdomain leasing is one of them?

How do leased subdomains (or folders) rank so fast?

Leased subdomains manage to rank way faster than any other established brand in the coupon industry.

How? Online newspapers usually belong to a bigger group, owning several domains. The Verge is part of Vox Media, owning Recode and NY Magazine for example. These groups are basically leveraging their network to rank new domains/subdomains fast. They link to the leased domain using keyword-rich anchor like "coupon codes".

And of course, Google will rank faster a website receiving a decent number of links from these popular websites than a new brand on targeted terms. Moreover, the content itself is not bad because it fulfills search intent as good as any other competitor.

For newspapers, being able to rank quickly a website on a new vertical is great because it allows them to compensate a bit the loss of revenue from the advertising side, mentioned at the beginning.