Should paywalls and capped visit sites be banned? - Some thoughts

The most heated debate on the popular subreddit /r/technology right now is whether or not to ban paywalls and sites which limit the number of views or posts to the user unless they cough up some monies. In fact, this topic is the top pinned post right now!

This is a quite difficult and double-edged question. Paywalls create a very annoying experience to the casual audience who has just come to read the news. For one, everyone cannot afford to subscribe to news services, the number of college students with high debt and people who are either unemployed or working in low pay jobs is very high. There is also the case that information wants to be free and ideally, should flow freely. I don't think free flowing information is something firms should be allowed to monopolize on.

But on the other hand, news agencies also want to thrive and news reporters want to get paid. I can understand their perspective because gathering facts and presenting stories isn't an easy task, a lot of effort goes into it. If people aren't paid fairly for the jobs they are doing, then we will end up with sub-standard and low-quality content which isn't good for the internet as a whole.

So, what is the solution to this? Is there any middle-ground approach where both the audience and content-creators are happy? I can think of a few approaches:

1. Ad Revenue: Advertising revenue is what the content creators should be focusing on. Some may call it unethical and even I hate ads myself when I see them on the page but they are still preferable to paywalls. While its also true that ad-blockers are steadily destroying the ad-revenue stream, there is still a lot of time until blockers are used by a majority of users. For example, Android based Chrome is the most popularly used browser and it doesn't even allow ad-blocking, so there is space to thrive in this region!
   
   
2. Socialist Agencies and NGO: There is an opportunity here for socialists and non-governmental organizations to step in and help keep news free. There are many astronomically rich people in this world like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, George Soros, etc. and if each one of them decides to contribute a little pocket money towards this cause, this problem will be solved soon.
   
   
3. Secondary Sources: There are limitations to how far the above two measures will work. Ultimately, the audience has to get smart. Why should they depend on only popular agencies like New York Times and WAPO? They should start considering secondary sources too in the blogosphere, youtube, etc. and start appreciating them too. I know all of them aren't genuine and couldn't be trusted but you can experiment by doing trial-and-error. The more you experiment, the more they'll improve because search engines will boost their rankings thanks to your readership. Finally, it'll help the poor bloggers and youtubers make a living too, so you are killing two birds with one stone!