If paywalls don't work, and ads don't work, some kind of metered-browsing would be a solution. It's so far away from happening, it's hardly worth discussing, but imagine this:
* let's say soundcloud could charge $.0001 (or something) for every pageview (or play, or some other interaction that the website chooses)
* this fee is mostly transparent to the user, they've signed up once, and have access to all metered sites
* the user would deposit money in an account ahead of time to use for the metered sites
* the metering could be built-in to web browsers to display when you're on a metered site using a standard graphic (like how the lock is a standard symbol for a secure connection)
What you're describing is very close to https://contributor.google.com/ where you can pay to replace ads with content of your choice. For the content publisher this is a completely transparent operation.
On second thought, after doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the per-pageview fee would have to be a lot more than that. Even if you charged $.01 per pageview, that still couldn't compete with ad revenue.
* let's say soundcloud could charge $.0001 (or something) for every pageview (or play, or some other interaction that the website chooses)
* this fee is mostly transparent to the user, they've signed up once, and have access to all metered sites
* the user would deposit money in an account ahead of time to use for the metered sites
* the metering could be built-in to web browsers to display when you're on a metered site using a standard graphic (like how the lock is a standard symbol for a secure connection)