May be it's a good thing for the news/media industry. Why rely on flimsy ads. If your news contents are credible and important to users they'll subscribe to it a la Netflix or HBO Go.
> Mobile Web revenues are a tiny shred of revenue compared to desktop experiences
That's already changing and will continue to change.
The real company to watch is News Corp. The Sun in the UK was just eclipsed by the Daily Mail largely as a result of The Sun having a paywall on their website. This meant more web traffic to Daily Mail which then brought in new customers and translated to more newspaper sales. Likewise in Australia the paywall sites e.g. The Australian have been struggling. Making the subscription model work is turning out to be a lot harder than it looks for many.