Looking at my content subscriptions, about 40% of the content is created by people who seem to be earning some type of income by that content. If eventually we found ourselves at a web-bankruptcy where everyone suddenly realized that there is not going to be any economic model that works - well, most of content would still keep getting produced, and for the rest there would be alternatives made by people who don't make it their business. I mean, that alternative content is already being made, it's just not viewed as much because it's crowded out by the overwhelming amount of other content.

The quantity of available good content created every day in many areas from internet posts to music far outweighs anyone's ability to consume them. We're throwing away 99% or more of it anyways, so if changing economics would make half of the content producers stop producing content, it's not a big deal for the total market. The song from a local artist with 5000 listens is as good as the hit with 5000000 listens, and it's not going to get there only because all the attention is already busy; if the producers of that hit wouldn't distribute because of economic reasons... well, the other song would suddenly get the same listeners, that's it.

A decrease in available content is a bad thing, but just a bit bad - if a reasonable model works out, it would be great, but if not, then "no ads, no payment, less content - if you want, then make it, you might get some donations, but it's not a business" will be a natural outcome that's actually not that bad for most people. Well, except the current crop of web-content-manufacturing companies - but the whole cause of this debacle is that people don't value them nearly as much as they would like to be valued.