Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

I don't think it's really relevant for society that a few websites don't profit from advertising.
The best things in life and on the internet are free. If there was no way to profit from advertising the internet would still rock. There would be less duplicated content, too.

Advertising produces no improvement at all for people's lives and it end up being a tax on consumption.
The little it does, it does it very inefficiently: for one interested person there is one thousand bothered users. It wastes bandwidth and resources too. It also messes up our subconscious.

Closing public access is however even worse: the content is there and easily deliverable to the entire world, people should not be cut out.

We haver to remember we live in a system that has defects and shortcomings and should be continually improved. This economy made perfect sense one hundred years ago, but it does not now. It's only good for physical products and services.
We are very close to have the technology needed for automatizing most of the production. People could have anything they want for free. Check out what a resource based economy would be.

I personally am an adblock user. I would not click ads if I saw them. I would not blow my money on things I don't need, so I don't want to be bothered.

As of now the only solution I see is to limit advertising by law or some technical mean to be less invasive. If everybody did it, nobody would lose money.
That or getting a real job :-)