Look, it's easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be replaced by a company that will. You can have micropayments (failed experiment), subscriptions, or ads. Empirically it seems like ads or other non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted subscription-based models for most content. Given that the "war" is entirely technical & visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads, the question is just whether you'll read a publication that has ads, or not. Empirically, the general population will.

(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).