It&#x27;s silly to say that the only choices are &quot;only ads pay for content&quot; and &quot;everyone pays the same for content&quot;. That&#x27;s a silly level of reductionism and simplicity which was an outdated model even a century ago, and is absolutely not the way things work today.<p>There are tons of content creators today, mostly artists, who nevertheless give away their work &quot;for free&quot;. It&#x27;s not rocket science how they do this, there are numerous different models for making it work. And some of them are millionaires. At the simplest you can use a pledge drive model, or patreon, where folks who want to pay can and folks who don&#x27;t or can&#x27;t pay don&#x27;t. This has kept tons of public radio and tv stations in business for decades, for example.<p>Another model is to do up-front crowd funding for projects. There are tons of these sorts of projects where the end production is available to everyone for free. There&#x27;s little reason why journalists can&#x27;t rely on such models (as indeed some have already).<p>Those are just some among many business models, some of which are already being employed by content creators on the internet.