I don't understand why people have such a deep seated hatred for advertisements. I don't actually find them terribly obtrusive unless they make noise or are a pop-up window, and a website is still a business that needs to make money to run. They aren't doing you a favor by making content you enjoy, they are running a business and advertising is a way to avoid charging their audience for the product.

Right now there are three major solutions to the problem of getting money for a website and none of them are very good. You are really down to either running through donations, running through advertisements, or setting up a paywall. Of course you can combine these in various degrees, but really that's it.

With a paywall, what happens is people pirate your content. One person gets an account, distributes the information to as many other people as click on the link. Even if its just sharing with friends, that's 5 sources of revenue gone right off the bat. Is piracy of articles as common as it is for movies, music, and video games? Of course not. Still there though, and even if its only a small percentage of your userbase, that adds up over time.

Donations are inconsistent and they aren't really sustainable as a business model. So yes, for relatively small sites like Hubski or for individual bloggers like Spoony, donations work. I'm fairly certain mk is not drawing a terribly large profit from here, but he can correct me on that if I'm wrong.

So what's left? Well, advertising in some form. Why? Because its really not that obtrusive and it does help curb pirated content while giving revenue to the creators. Why try and steal something that only costs maybe 30 seconds of your time to experience, or less if its a banner ad? There really isn't any.

I really hate the term entitlement, but for the most part that's what I see. Its a way to get content to creators without taking a dime out of the audience's pocket, and yet people have developed a way to utterly and totally destroy a model that is doing very little harm to them and their wallets.

Can you imagine a world where everything is behind a paywall of some kind? How many individual subscriptions you'd need to keep up, in addition to paying for the internet itself? That's my idea of hell on the web. Having to mange 10+ subscriptions just to view the content that I do today is not my idea of a good time.