The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers.

What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.

I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.

Just 90% of it.

You can still have adverts on style free sites:

    <a href="adverts.com?ad-id=12345><img src="adverts.com/ads/12345.jpg></a>

Then there's paid for promotional content, which is one of the current trends on the web at the moment anyway.

As long as information can be rendered then adverts can be included.

Trivial to defraud.

Only if you see the current "pay-per-click" model as inevitable. In fact, for a long time advertisers were very happy to just pay for a certain space on a newspaper page, without even knowing how many people would actually look at this page. Many advertisers still pay for space where they have no precise figure on how many people will ever see their ad (billboards, TV, radio).

Granted, I think such a world on the web would be difficult for all the tiny blogs that earn (usually very little) money through ad networks, where the advertiser has no idea on which page their ads will show up. But for larger sites, the "fraud" issue doesn't arise as much (because they have a reputation to lose) and you might also just pay for being visible there. The Deck is pretty succesful in their niche with this model and I am sure for brands like the New York Times it would also work well.

So are the current ad models. That's why ad networks have heuristics to detect click patterns and time spent on the advertisers page. The former is easy to replicate since it's all done server side anyway. The latter would require a less information dense page with a "read more" link to approximate what's currently done in JS et all. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the standard and banners were replaced with more tailored solutions like affiliate links (eg blogs about building tools would link to online stores. Blogs about software could link to online bookstores selling books on that software).

At the end of the day if someone wants to promote a product and someone else wants to make money promoting products then there will be an advertisement model that will spring up