You pay for the content anyway. The cost of a product contains the cost of advertising.
In case of search results? Then Google should pay websites for displaying their content.
Can you think of any content (software, for example) that is produced without advertising?
No, but that doesn't mean content producers have other sources of income, specially when those consuming it aren't willing to pay them.
Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production.
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
I've seen some ad-free alternative, but they usually have much less budget on promoting themselves, so harder to reach the critical mass (for network effect)
For example our content on HN (although a portion of them are advertisement, not that that hard sales.)