This is ignoring things like newspapers that were made obsolete by the internet. At some point someone does need to actually pay for the content we see online. That is if we want that content to actually be good.
Paying doesn't inherently make things more valuable and can even provide incentives for the opposite. And most of the people creating "content" for the web today aren't even being paid at all - it's third parties plastering the ads on it and profiting.