Who says we don't want to pay? Some of the most profitable newspapers are completely paywalled and have been for years. Someone wants to pay. I will gladly pay myself.

But I will only pay for ad-free content.

Remember how cable TV used to have that promise? You pay for your TV and you don't have ads. I remember that back in the day my cable provider would broadcast listings of today's programming schedule to cover up ads in the source transmission. Now you pay and you watch ads. If we do pay for websites, I hope we pay for no ads.

Looking at my content subscriptions, about 40% of the content is created by people who seem to be earning some type of income by that content. If eventually we found ourselves at a web-bankruptcy where everyone suddenly realized that there is not going to be any economic model that works - well, most of content would still keep getting produced, and for the rest there would be alternatives made by people who don't make it their business. I mean, that alternative content is already being made, it's just not viewed as much because it's crowded out by the overwhelming amount of other content.

The quantity of available good content created every day in many areas from internet posts to music far outweighs anyone's ability to consume them. We're throwing away 99% or more of it anyways, so if changing economics would make half of the content producers stop producing content, it's not a big deal for the total market. The song from a local artist with 5000 listens is as good as the hit with 5000000 listens, and it's not going to get there only because all the attention is already busy; if the producers of that hit wouldn't distribute because of economic reasons... well, the other song would suddenly get the same listeners, that's it.

A decrease in available content is a bad thing, but just a bit bad - if a reasonable model works out, it would be great, but if not, then "no ads, no payment, less content - if you want, then make it, you might get some donations, but it's not a business" will be a natural outcome that's actually not that bad for most people. Well, except the current crop of web-content-manufacturing companies - but the whole cause of this debacle is that people don't value them nearly as much as they would like to be valued.

Its not that we don't want to pay - its that we're only willing to pay when asked to do so - nobody is going to stand up and say I'll pay. And publishers aren't trying to make things readers want; advertisers have become more important to publishers than users, and that dynamic is what needs to change (just as its changing with TV/netflix/hbogo/amazon, etc)

I will gladly pay for something that I feel to be more valuable to me than anything else I could buy with an equivalent amount of money. Typically, I demand some form of material benefit in exchange for my cash.

I do, in fact, pay for a voluntary subscription to a web site that is free to use, ad-free even without ad-blockers, and entirely donation-supported.

But that's pretty much the only thing I pay for on the entire web. All other sites fall into one or more of several categories. (A) They don't need my money to continue operating as usual. (B) I wouldn't care all that much if they disappeared from the web. (C) The effort of paying makes payments worthwhile only for amounts greater than I am willing to spend. (D) I am not confident that any payment I might make would specifically support something that I like, and not things that I do not like. (E) My budget for frivolous spending has already been pre-empted by higher-priority spending this month.

The "independent" food blog in the linked article could be financially motivated to review certain things at a certain result; think of video game publications as a model.

The more likely result is the cost of providing a service over the internet continues to constantly implode; if the independent food blogger is motivated enough to spend $5/mo for internet "fame" there are numerous providers today who will take money in exchange for hosting. There may be a revolution in web design; a "cool looking complicated" web page might cost 5 megs of javascript and graphics and that might cost a blogger $5/mo if less than 1000 visit per month, but if the blogger gets famous for actual content (as opposed to web design) then once the blogger hits the 1M visits per month big leagues, shrinking the page from 5M to 5K might save the blogger a factor of a thousand in hosting costs. I don't think web designers will be happy about this; then again they won't be paying the bills. This will lead to something like the ancient "adobe flash" effect where the fancier a web page is designed and appears, the less likely it is to contain useful content, so it can be skipped, and the less complicated a page looks, the better the content it serves.

Another way the economics of the model would work is a trivial extension that probes all links at rendering time and if the link comes up as payment required the link is eaten. Currently I have to remember to ignore NYT links; in the future with the new extension I won't even see NYT links.

Another model that may develop is content that sellers want, like glowing "independent" reviews of a restaurant, might go away (relatively speaking) in a consumer oriented internet. This works on all levels from very small to very large, the advertisers pay for Gawker no matter if I look at it or not, given supposed levels of click fraud. Without the advertisers, if we don't look at Gawker it simply goes away. Rephrased and simplified, now you can push something no one likes except the advertisers if the advertisers pay for it, but in a future internet economy if you push something no one likes, you'd better be prepared to pay for it by yourself. That might have interesting socioeconomic class issues WRT widening income inequality; all billionaires will have blogs, no poor people will, and a way to filter college applications to make sure the "right" people are let in would be to require blog submission instead of traditional essay submission or the other socioeconomic filters we use now like extracurriculars or disaster tourism, etc.