Ads are not the only way to make money on the internet.
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I know there are other business models but I would not be surprised if we hit a point where ad supported content no longer exists. I hope some new "free" business model is developed because I certainly don't want a pay as you go model.
On the mobile side, Apple sells hardware, which pays for the servers that power Siri. Search engines may end up with that model.
The news industry is already dead. Except for the New York Times, Reuters, and the Economist, news sites are mostly fluff.
It's time for a tax on advertising.
Google Adsense recommends you stuff as many ads on to your page as possible. They even alert tell you when you are missing out on revenue by not including the maximum number of ad units.
At the same time Google Search announces a penalty for overly ad heavy sites.
Ultimately, I believe most of Google's "search penalties" actually serve the purpose of driving any site that makes money to paid search. They disguise them as "UX enhancements" but they really just want you to pay for traffic. They are even trying to compete with Amazon in the Google Shopping product.
Edit: I'll followup really quick on how ads can be harmful with regard to content making. Ad revenue scales based on eyeballs alone, that's the primary metric. To maximize profit that means you need the most eyeballs and the cheapest to produce content. That causes a pressure towards tabloid-style content, especially in journalism, which has become a very noticeable trend. When there's a more direct route for revenue from content consumers to producers there's more reward for producing higher value content. Having correctly aligned incentives is hugely valuable, and something that has been sorely missing in regard to a lot of content that was produced in the 20th century.
It's always easy to look at major business changes as hugely scare and potentially calamitous but in the end it's extraordinarily unlikely that the fire to create art can be easily extinguished and the hunger to consume it won't result in sufficient expenditures to enable creators to support themselves. Overall I'd say a lot of what I've seen in regards to how new creators emerge and get on their feet and how that's changed since the dawn of the web-era has been almost exclusively beneficial.
Full disclaimer: I made a decent amount of money from advertising in the past. That doesn't mean I don't sympathize with users/consumers. The ad industry pushed too far and users are pushing back.
Also I'd probably prefer ads on wikipedia versus the yearly begging but that's another topic.
For some reason you seem to fall into the trap of thinking that ads vs "begging" are the only options, though that's not going to be true, isn't true now, and hasn't been true for literally decades. There are tons of ways to make money with a non-paywalled content site on the internet, as witnessed by... the many ways that people have been making money on such things for going on two decades.
Probably. Though I'm pretty sure the ability to make money (not necessarily form ads) was a driver.
Right now it seems like people want to leach the content with out paying the bills.
The main advantage of ads is that they are potentially brain-dead easy to enable profitability if you have lots of traffic. But even then that's not necessarily an objectively good thing.
Also, I wouldn't say that "people want to leach ... with out paying" is accurate whatsoever. Between merch, events, crowd funding, and patronage (patreon et al) there is a massive and rapidly growing amount of money that has been going to content creators direct from content consumers. It's easier than it's been in a long time, perhaps ever, for a creator to support themselves, aside from ads, and it's only getting easier.
But it really only hurts the small business trying to eek out a living. Small businesses will go under and what's left will be large conglomerates.
Hacker news seems to be a popular place for people that no nothing about economics and do everything in their power to willingly give up markets to the likes of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
The interesting part is that that then there's outrage when the above companies abuse their monopoly...when the regulations and culture that you supported created them in the first place!
http://www.pledgesociety.com/ (Patreon)
There are certainly sites that make way more than $67k per month in advertising fees.
Tipping might be one of the possible business models but it still has a long way to go.
It's not the only way to make money on the Internet, but it is one of the only ways someone with very little money can actually make a living on the Internet.
One more example of the tech community helping large companies take over entire industries and make it nearly impossible to start a company without massive capital.
It started with open source: Businesses now can take entire open source apps, which were engineered for free, and hire software mechanics at 1/4 the cost.
Napster and file sharing only made it impossible for the average independent artist to make a living on music. I know a handful of artists that could at least make a decent living before file sharing changed the mindset of the average user. Now, nobody will buy their music because they can just get it for free. Services like Spotify are a joke with nearly 1 million plays netting the artist something like $100.
Think about it next time you see these articles that claim that the only way to have a successful business is to come from a rich family and realize that the reason this is the case is because of increased government regulations and a community culture that supports the further destruction of small businesses.