It is advertising-driven but I maintain some standards which my readers have appreciated: ads must relevant, not animated, and they are self-hosted. At this point I don't think advertisers have had any issues with those rules and because of my repeat customers, I believe they get the results they are looking for.
It might be possible to charge readers, but I'm more interested in trying out good advertising practices instead.
The site loaded very quickly and the top menu worked fine with JavaScript disabled. The ads in the right sidebar aren't explicitly marked as ads but it's pretty obvious what they are. I don't mind visiting a site like this and seeing a mix of original content and ads, all of which are relevant.
If more sites followed you lead here, more people like me would see ads. And if they upped their technical game and used server logging to measure visits instead of outsourcing it to third-party analytics providers, they would have a more complete picture of who is visiting their site.