I completely disagree with this. Firstly, the media currently are too lucrative for my taste and thats why we have everyone being a journalist and publisher. By cutting down on the easy money, only those worth surviving will probably stand. This will seriously cut down on more than just ads, ie fake news and unverified sources. An alternative I'd love to see is sponsored articles as the main source of income for these. Let the corporations have to pay bigger bucks to have their posts published. This will hopefully reduce the clutter, force the media outlets to provide quality content to keep a certain level of trust and quality to attract businesses as well as a good targeted audience.

Personally I'd live to have most media completely in the dark about visitors to solely speculate on the quality of their own content. Only metric they need is daily visitor count. Everything else can be shaped by type and quality of content. A great example is HN where we have a very targeted audience due to the content it serves. It obviously also has some sponsored articles but also the indirect benefits it has on new startups and so on. Just treat it as TV marketing and not a per person customized monetization strategy.