Ask HN: Anyone experienced with donations instead of adsense?

I hate ads. I truly do. I believe they cheapen great content and cheapen a brand. They are a "necessary evil" if you want to make money and pay the overhead of a site though.

For the last year I have been running my site out of my own pocket, because I love what I do. On any good day I'll bring in 10-20 dollars with Google Adsense. Not bad, it pays the bills and I'm OK with that. My best 48 hours I hit the front page of Reddit, 300,000 uniques, and made a whopping $554 in adsense money. WOO! Too bad my hosting bill including overages was $550. I pocketed $4.

I've noticed a few sites, namely wikipedia, run solely on donations. Mind you, I know the amount of traffic that they have and my site pales in comparison to them.

Do you think it's worth a shot to take out all the ads and try to rely solely on donations? Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, what happened?