And how do you pay for the content to be created?
It turns out when you have a simple and obvious business model, it's easy to pay for content - iTunes enabled us to actually buy music (kind of, we're in the middle of screwing the artists over with bulk streaming deals and what I suspect is a lot of RIAA-contact lock ins preventing direct sales).
But really, how valuable do you think your blog post about someone else's blog post is? Or a news site reporting on what happened from Twitter, or publishing articles which are taken whole-sale from bullet pointed corporate and political press releases?
Why not think about pando daily, the verge, 9to5mac?
Personally I believe if the reader base of a site is genuine and not heavily dependent on one-hit readers, they shouldn't rely on an ad-driven model. At least, not solely. Call it guilt-tripping, donation driving, paywalling, microtransactions, anything you will. As long as it's not the ad networks actually asking for dosh. It's merely crowdfunding on a more diffuse and intimate level, since the aim is for the site to exist down the line indefinitely.
This for-profit free-content model also ruins a lot of paid business models, which might otherwise be successful. We get rid of the overhead of the advertisment industry and retain more money to pay for good journalism etc.
I literally have never heard of the 3 things you just listed.