I used to be the tech lead for a Major Music Magazine's website. I didn't
work for
the magazine itself, though, due to complicated boring corporate stuff
that you don't care about, and thus I will definitely explain it to you.

The Magazine came from an old-school print tradition, didn't have tech
people in-house, and frankly resented
that it needed an online presence. So it found a series of sucker tech
companies to partner with; in the case of my sucker tech company, at least,
the deal was that they provided all the content, we built the whole site,
they had creative control and design authority, we did all the ad sales, we
got the vast majority of the ad revenue.

This may sound on the face of it like a pretty okay way to do things. The
magazine has a bunch of content and needs a website; the tech company can
build websites but doesn't have the content. Cool, right?

The trick is that this meant two companies from different industries on
opposite coasts had to work together and agree on everything.
"Cross-corporation consensus" is a phrase that should strike fear in the
heart of anyone who's ever worked with a third-party.

The other trick is that the companies had completely opposite incentives.
The Magazine had bore none of the cost of
engineering, and made essentially no money off the ads. The Tech Company
bore the whole engineering cost, and got all its revenue from the ads.
Recall, if you will, that the magazine had design control, and thus control
of the cost that its tech partner will have to pay.

So on the one side you have a magazine that is getting a free thing built
for them, with no skin in the game to keep them from making ridiculously
complicated designs; on the other, you have a tech company that wants to
build this thing completely on the cheap with a skeleton staff. Maybe in
some alternate timeline both parties realized they were critical
to each other's success, and this worked out beautifully as they both
labored to make their partner delighted.

It didn't happen in this timeline, though! Haha everything was fucked