> I'd prefer to pay, anonymously, but as people clearly won't cos they want free stuff at any cost, advertising will persist. It's a social problem not a technical one.

It's more of a content quality issue. There are examples where large numbers of people will pay for quality content (example [1]). Large swathes of 'content' is junk (clickbait, listicles, submarine articles, actual fake news, etc) and few will pay for that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/24/guardian-media...