Unfortunately we have a prisoner's dilemma where people will defect from "costs a little money" to "free with ads" to "free and I block the ads" to "no content."
We'll never get to "no content" because people want quality content and are willing to pay. It's just a matter of the market figuring out how to match supply and demand. There will be a lot of failures along the way but it will happen.
There are lots of things where "someone wants to provide X" and "someone wants to consume X" and even if they could agree on cost, they can't, because market failure.
"The market will figure it out" isn't something handed down from God. I've observed industry segments get drained because someone tried to give away the product, driving all other players out of the market, and then the one remaining player was unable to support themselves because their customers had been trained to get it for free.