New York Times' SEM strategy

I was searching for George Carlin, and saw this ad by New York Times:

It led to this George Carlin obituary on the NYT website. Very valuable information, as a user.

But I am wondering what's NYT's business model for such kind of search engine marketing. Assuming they're amongst the lowest bidders on Google, they'd still end up paying almost 5 cents per click, i.e., they have to make $50 per 1000 visits.

If each visitor does only 1 page view per session, which seems likely given this landing page, NYT would effectively have to monetize at $50 CPM net. Which seems pretty high for the George Carlin obituary. Even at 2 page views per visit, which seems high looking at this landing page, NYT would have to make $25 net.

The only ads I saw on that page were a WaMU ad and a KBB ad, both of which were untargeted, as well as some text links from Google.  Oh, and also some house ads.

Are the folks at NYT assuming a lifetime value to a user "acquired" through SEM? Or are they trying to recover the money they spend on each visit?  Or is there no accounting at all, and is it clubbed under some fuzzy "marketing spend" which doesn't have to confirm to any profitability metric?

Whatever be the answer, it seems to me that outside of shopping and lead gen companies, a lot of companies advertising on Google still haven't figured out the economics of the Adwords marketplace.