I thought maybe you'd go in the direction of laws or licenses being used to prohibit advertising in certain contexts, like downstream use of content, but what I'm hearing is that profiting off other's free content is fine, but in your opinion doing so with ads just isn't cool with you. That's reasonable, I just thought maybe your desired solution was more systemic.
Ultimately he's trying to cover his own salary. Would be interesting to know what that salary is, and what the price point would have to be to eliminate the ad revenue completely. As it stands, many balked at a one time cost of $20.