Remember when Google had no ads? Want to use Google without ever seeing an ad again? Just use Firefox and Greasemonkey and Customize Google.
In the war between web advertisers and web browsers who want to avoid ads, Greasemonkey is the freaking Manhattan Project. I installed it and saw what it could do and whispered, “I am become Death, the destroyer of ad revenue.”
So how can people ever afford to publish content on the web, if not via ad revenue?
Well… one way is by giving up control of the content. Bandwidth is expensive, if it’s bandwidth on a server you control. Bandwidth is cheap if you give up control and let people share in the task of distributing your stuff. Peer to peer technologies let you publish like crazy. Open source projects are never lacking for a dozen friendly mirror sites for their code. You got creative commons licensed content? No prob. Publish it on OurMedia or Archive.org. They’ll give you the storage. But you have to give up some control. Not all control. Just enough to make things easy on the sharers, to give them a stake, to give them some rights with regards to the stuff they’re helping you distribute.
That’s one way to do it anyway. There may be other ways. But the “Ad Revenue” trick is not seeming like a very viable option anymore, in light of the power of things like Greasemonkey.