For one reason, it's the system we have now. There's a lot of industry inertia that would simply be easier to keep than throw away and switch to a new system. I

For one reason, it's the system we have now. There's a lot of industry inertia that would simply be easier to keep than throw away and switch to a new system. If you want to convince everyone to switch, the question is really, "Why not just ads?", especially if it's relatively easy to fix the problems we face now. From a practical perspective, you need to convince all the stakeholders to abandon ads, which isn't easy. But yeah, personally I'd prefer a different system. I really like the idea of micropayments, but I don't know how that would look exactly.