The bigger issue, IMHO, is quality of advertising rather than its presence. People pay $15 for a theater ticket and sit through 10 minutes of ads, buy Vogue magazine and have 30%+ of pages be ads, buy The New York Times and be hit with ads all over the place, watch the Superbowl specifically to see the ads, and more. What people seem to really want are better ads or even ads that are entertainment or content in their own right (which is why native advertising has taken off).
Or a revamped pricing scheme for the website they might favor for their content. Seeing how the internet and computers allows for many more content to be published at a fraction of the cost of yesterday's system, there is a gap to be filled between the old pricing scheme of hard copies newspaper and all "free" content of the web.
$15 per month per website (like the NYT) seems a bit excessive when 10 or 20 other websites might offer the same news and at least a dozen direct competitors have similar offers. My father and his father might have had a subscription to a couple of newspaper/magazine, but I have the news at my finger tips.
