Why is this something that needs a "study"? You can make corporate-funded user research come to any conclusion you want. It's obvious on the face of it that the more you rely on ads the more ads control the content and eventually become the content. No company funded by ads is going to publish a study saying people don't like ads.
Yeah so social studies based on internet polls aren't science (see parents) and making decisions or drawing conclusions from them is probably worse than going off anecdotal evidence, because at least you aren't confident in how right you are when going that route.
Consumers will pay. The funding of newspapers is a major factor of why current journalism isn’t worth paying for: clickbait headlines, access journalism, slideshow content, listicles, opinion sections. There’s plenty of ad-independent journalism out there if you look that successfully funds itself through donations or memberships.
