I have become interested in the nexus of journalism, ads, personal privacy, and our need to accurately understand the world around us. One of the individuals I follow who offers opinions on this set of variables is CUNY professor and TV pundit Jeff Jarvis. While he claims to be an optimist, his analyses typically lead in the direction of explaining why quality news sources as we know them are doomed. He just organized many of his arguments in a piece he wrote for Medium.
I agree with some of arguments, but see the future playing out in a little different way. I think we are drawing close to a tipping point at which time informative content will go the way of music and be offered through aggregated subscription services similar to Pandora or Spotify. I agree with Jarvis that ad revenue is not a sustainable model. I have no idea how frequently readers voluntarily click through unobtrusive ads and blocking other ads has become commonplace. The growing realization that services such as Google and Facebook collect and sell the informations on user behavior to target ads and other content intended to influence consumers will probably eventually lead to government intervention. The intervention is well deserved as companies have grown greedy in this abuse of readers/viewers and veil exactly what they are doing with claims that they must protect their algorithms.
Or, things might move in a different direction.
I like the approach taken by the group associated with the Brave browser. It is idealistic at present, but I think any content producers will get to the point where they will block consumers who are attempting to block ads. The Brave group offers both protection for consumers and a revenue stream for content producers.
A change of some type is coming.