[drey08]

That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.

[icelancer]

Many sites do this. Baseball-reference is one of them.

[ianlevesque]

Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.

[ferrari8608]

Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).

[w1ntermute]

FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a userscript that @matches http://*.wikipedia.org/*:

    setTimeout(function() {
        fundraisingBanner.hide();
    }, 1000);

[fwn]

This ublock custom rule worked for me:

  ||https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:bannerloader

[3pt14159]

Or just sign into your wikipedia account.

[tomjen3]

I consider them ads and use adblock to block those as well.

[fragmede]

Google's actually testing this out - http://consumerist.com/2014/11/20/googles-new-contributor-fe...

[Omniusaspirer]

Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.