It's a sad sad story. I love reading great content and I never had problems paying for great content. I've been a subscriber to paid magazines/papers and I'll continue to be one to digital ones. But I guess my kind is rare and of course the majority always wins.
There are a lot of people who only want "free" information (which is to say free news, free reviews, free self help advice, etc) and of course providing information is not 'free' as it costs real dollars to host it, to maintain it, to fix it up after the web site gets hacked etc.
To enable it to stay 'free' people put advertisements on the page which the advertiser pays the costs of hosting the content.
That creates an incentive to monetize the difference between the cost of the content and the revenue from the ads. Given the incentive all sorts of suppliers have arisen, from domain squatters at the low end, to businesses like Demand Media and AOL apparently.
If you look at content creation you will see that this is creating 'content' at an unsustainable rate. At some point, a small population at first, and then growing larger, of people will say "I'll pay you for information that is 'better' rather than pay the cost of wading through the free crap to get to the good stuff."
When that switch reaches a large enough number of readers, I believe it will 'spontaneously' create the actual market for purely digital information sources. The blend of subscriber revenue and modest ad revenue will create a better reader experience and quality companies will emerge to take advantage of that.