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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Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.
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.
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.
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.