I think charging money (paywall, donations) is the only acceptable way for sites that can't do "big player" ads such as finding sponsors or having native advertising.
Patreon has proven itself to be a good model for a lot of bloggers out there with the right kind of following.
The main issue is that to replace all advertising revenue across the board, everybody would need to pitch in something like $150/month. I like paying for things to get rid of ads, and I'm not even sure I'd make that commitment.
Where is your $150/month coming from? I'm not convinced the average user is worth that much in ads per month. The numbers I've seen coming out of Facebook put it in low-single digit dollars per month per user for Facebook, and I would tend to imagine they're getting more out than many rather than less. But, honest question, if you've got a good source on that I'd love to see it.
(There's also the fact that the utility of ads is fundamentally bounded by what they can make you spend. By their nature, the amount someone is willing to spend to remove ads and the amount of money ads can possibly be making on the person are probably held more tightly than you might expect, due to the underlying third-factor of correlation with the amount of money the person in question can spend.)
The unfortunate thing is we're already paying that money, since the money spent by companies on ads comes out of the revenue we give them for goods and services.
Hence we can afford to support things through Patreon, Flattr, etc. instead of through ads, if the existing money were shuffled around.
We probably can't do it as well as through ads, but to free up that money the sellers of goods and services would have to stop charging us for their ads, and there's no incentive for them to do that :(
> to free up that money the sellers of goods and services would have to stop charging us for their ads,
There is a possible mechanism that could free up that money: without ads sellers can't rely on popularity to sell their products and have to rely more on underselling the competition.
I remember at one point reading an advertising industry report about ad revenue + avg. number of uniques over the year, and did the division
I can't find this anymore, but did find an estimate that internet ad industry did $60 billion last year. Assuming 1 billion users ( I know more people have internet but lots probably don't interact with ad-ridden sites), you're talking $60/year. Which is pretty good overall.
