It seems structured to fail. Anyone annoyed enough by ads isn't going to pay for 50% less ads when they could have 100% less ads for free with an ad blocker.
There are few reasons I do this: (1) uBlock is overzealous -- it breaks some websites and I'm not interested enough to tweak it to not break them. (2) Sites I like (e.g., boingboing, The Sweethome) don't get any money when I use uBlock, but they do if I use Contributor
I recognize that I'm a weird Silicon Valley type but I'm hopeful that we aren't too rare. There are dozens of us. Dozens!