It's not Techcrunch that PG has in mind though - they have nothing to do with data mining.
People paying directly for content suffers from another flaw - externalities. It makes no economic sense for any individual to sponsor public well being, so the Nash equilibrium is they don't do it.
I guess you'd need data crunchers to either 1) figure out how to make ads work, or 2) do market research.
Ads don't work in the context of general news, but they may work in verticals. Market research may not be big enough right now, but there is a general shift towards data-based decision making and if market research is cheap enough, more and more people would use it.