[potatote]

Is it fair to assume that the model of voluntary contribution/donation doesn't stick with the major publishers because they could potentially make less money by adopting such model? Is there any major content publisher which adopts voluntary-donation-as-income model? I can see that a lot of casual reader like me will forget (or some intentionally ignore) to "tip/donate" whenever we read, say, the New York Times (by "casual", I mean someone like me who reads one NYT article a day at most). For cases like mine, what about encouraging (via a pop-up at the corner?) the site visitors to donate if they visit your site to read a certain number of articles in a day or a week? Will that work?

I feel like there has to be a happy medium where publishers get paid some reasonable amount for their content, and readers also get to enjoy the content for a reasonable price. I think this model can coexist with the current model if the reader/content consumer doesn't mind the ads.

[singron]

What about public radio and TV? There are some sponsors and government funding, but I think they are largely based on private donations.

[autarch]

http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

Individuals are the largest single source of funding, but they don't make up the majority of it, at least for NPR. Corporate sponsorship is the next biggest piece, and while it's not very intrusive, AFAIC the sponsorship messages on NPR are basically ads (very tolerable ads, but still ads).

[robbrown451]

I often find the sponsership messages less tolerable than ads, at least when talking about public TV.

[mikeash]

Not sure what you'd count as "largely," but this shows about a third of the funding for US public radio coming from individuals: http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

And unfortunately, the messages they run to acknowledge corporate and foundation sponsors get more and more ad-like with each passing year.