I am sure I'm in the majority on this site, but I believe that it's possible to do advertising-supported content in a tasteful way where the ads add to the experience, or at least do not detract from it.
With NYT and WaPo, your subscription is supposed to support quality journalism. The tradeoff that you're agreeing to - pay but also see ads - is not going to work for say a music subscription service or a stock tips service. My argument holds for those businesses. I'd say that WaPo, WSJ, and NYT are outliers, not the mainstream.
Tasteful ads:
Web advertising is so democratic that even the smallest company or startup can spend a few hundred dollars and get in front of you. Demanding tastefulness from such advertisers puts us as the risk of "corporatising" ads again, imho.
Anyway, I don't want to commandeer this conversation. I'd love to hear other opinions from HN.
The proof is that the minute add-ons like DVRs and set top boxes like Roku came along, the first thing people did was to bail on the old TV model.
Internet ads don't
A single user can be exposed to 3-4 (or more) ads per page. Each ad can earn them some money depending on the relevance of the ad to the viewer. In this case, the price they charge the advertiser is more guesswork/auction than science. They don't have to/can't prove to anyone that the ad truly worked. Advertisers tweak and A/B test ads to achieve higher engagements and better results.
A fixed rate model like you're suggesting limits the scalability of selling the same pair of eyeballs to 3-4+ advertisers. It forces google and content creators to attach a hard number to each visitor which is essentially upper bound by people's spending habits - if people are feeling poor, they can simply stop visiting websites to make ends meet!
Fir these reasons, I don't believe any advertising based company is ever truly going to get behind pay-as-you-go content. I've made my bet (see my profile for deets aka FD) and I'm in the process of quitting my job to put my money where my mouth is.