There seem to be some missing pieces to your logic. The people making donations are making donations equivalent to a very large number of ads. The donations are equivalent to a fairly large number of ad clicks, let alone impressions. I'm not sure how this proves that ads are the only way to go, when it was this "easy" to raise the equivalent of millions (probably billions) of page views in a day.

This is why I'm uninterested in subscription Hulu for ~$10 a month; with my viewing habits and never-click-on-ads behavior there's no way the ad revenue for my viewing could possibly top $.50 for a month, but for that $.50 they're willing to do grave damage to my viewing experience. Ads don't make much money at all; it's not hard to make up for a lot of ads if people are directly giving you cash.