I'm not sure how much giving content away for free is a viable model. It depends on the meaning of viable; it isn't viable financially, but it can be a worthwhile sacrifice if you think that more people reading your content is going to mean more people are going to pay for it. More often than not, that's not the case though; a lot of the content we access is free, and the author won't get remunerated for it.

This is great for consumers, but it makes it a lot less interesting for producers. I'm not sure yet what the impact of that is going to be, but I suspect that it could mean a decrease in the quality of content overall, which would be detrimental to everyone.