This entire thing where your attention is hijacked because you have a passing interest in subject X is out of date. Yes, we've had passive ad sponsorship of all kinds of events in times past, but it wasn't a situation where the advertisers monitored your every move and were aggressively interfering with your content consumption. It was a situation where they wanted to be recognized for supporting the content you were consuming. Ads have gone from being passive, supportive, widespread constructs to being aggressive, directive, in-your-business constructs. Not good.
I don't mind ads. Trackers need to be outlawed. I'll tell an ad service what kinds of ads I'd like to see if they'd like. I don't want to be tracked though.
I'd be happily spending the equivalent of a annual nyt subscription per year but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a sole news site. As it is, everybody tries to do a vendor lock-in while whining that people are not walking into or get out of that trap.
I like it. Not sure how to get enough vendor participation, though. I imagine the way to go would be to pair up with one of the large ad networks -- you could even work it where if you pay, the ads don't come. If you're not in the system, you get ad-ed like everybody else.
My prediction is, if centralized content micropayment service is ever going to happen, it won't come from the publishers, but a big player with enough leverage like Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Then the publisher will write outrage articles about how unfair and anti press freedom the cut they get is. Until they adapt silently.
Maybe I'm a bit pessimistic, but I doubt that the proud traditional companies have learnt much from what happened in the music industry. Which on the bright side might be good for new media startups and different approaches to journalism.
There's some things that seem inevitable to me. True flat-rate music streaming services was one of those things and we're pretty much there. Moving away from ad-supported websites to a convenient subscription model is the other.
I don't think the war against AdBlock can be won. How do you disable a software that simply hides content? Force users to click the ads? Put them into more and more annoying places? We already know the endgame of that and it's shady pop-up orgies. I doubt the New York Times wants to be associated with that. But I also won't pay $10 for every single website I might visit a month (some, maybe, for only an article or two in a link).
What we need is a common subscription flat-rate that fairly splits revenue between websites you actually visit. Not sure about the privacy concerns but at least here, the user data wouldn't have to be used for advertising.