They argue that the centralization of advertising forces almost all companies to offer paid services and that those services lead to the overall online experience being more expensive.

They conclude that "we should recognize the trade we’ve made from ad-subsidized media to ad-subsidized search and social networking", which I guess is a well-intended statement but somewhat obvious, right?

Hacker News threads are filled with users arguing that they gladly pay a lot just to avoid advertising.

Their last sentence

> Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume.

I think is important, but maybe not for their reasons. Current paid services are sometimes very overpriced, which is partly caused by the lack of easy and scalable micro-transactions and a missing understanding of what a specific service might be worth. On the other hand there are some great services that get underused because users don't think the up-front cost are justified.

The turn to subscriptions that we see in random tiny auxiliary applications is a great example of that. The developers of a small CBT-App I used for a bit thought they were worth 8 euro a month. They tried it a few months and then gave up, largely because they apparently failed to find a shared understanding of their value with their users.