The previous model isn’t sustainable either. It leads to enshittification.
Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
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Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from).
There's always quality stuff and crap, no matter whether it's been produced for free or not.
There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.
Or worse, if its content were distributed in short videos: "What to know what's that giant fire ball on the sky? Watch until the end!", with a like-and-subscribe animation covering the bottom 20% of the video every 5 seconds.
The big channels nowadays usually have 2 websites: one that is free and full of ads and pop-ups with very superficial news (seemingly written by interns) and one with actual quality analysis, journalism etc. that allow you access of 3 articles a month before you need to pay or something of that sorts.
I think the “serving ads” business hasn’t worked for a while.
Wikipedia can also only work because the upstream scientific and academic work to produce what gets posted there is largely subsidized. Wikipedia posters and maintainers do not have to pay the true cost of the content they are posting and very little of it is original.
This model won’t work for, say, journalism, which is very expensive. It won’t work for difficult polished software products. It won’t work for truly original artistic or literary work which takes tremendous amounts of time to produce. If, for example, authors can’t charge for a novel, then only people with trust funds or who are independently wealthy can afford to invest the time it takes to write a book.
The people pointing out how bad ad supported content is are proving my point, which was that there must be some kind of economic model. If there is no working one, content producers default to ads which leads to enshittification.
Do I as a user have to do a micro transaction whenever an LLM generates an answer on one of those paywalled articles? Because as a user, I do not wish to read the quality journalist analysis, I wish for it to be part of the LLM answer that is tailored towards me.
But this is a huge simplification of course, and another thousand problems arise from this model. So I have no idea what’s the “good enough” solution we’ll head towards, or whether the web will change completely from this.