story
If users want your service, they will pay for it. If they don't, well then your services is not needed.
If you want to host your blog, then just pay for it. I do the same. Not because I want to earn money with it, but because I want to. I can see why this is a problem for commercial entities, but not for personal stuff.
So the site will die, because nobody thought it had any value.
What's the problem?
Nobody owes artists a living, a vocation that traditionally was engaged in alongside traditional paying work.
Nobody owes advertisers living, or their eyes and attention.
Nobody owes a living to the person who makes their money from ads all over their blog.
I'm sorry, but if your business model boils down to using your unknown blog and barely visited web site as a vehicle to bombard people with ads for money then you don't have a business model at all.
I really don't like your definition of 'free'. wikipedia has been relying on donations for quite some time. guardian.co.uk is one of the recent examples asking for donations and working out for them.
>science articles
Ok that has to be a joke, the paywall journals subscriptions are nothing like ads.
Please, don't conflate any pay method with pay wall (which is a pretty good one). If business cannot retain itself w/o breaking the law and has to shove unwanted images/videos/etc. straight in the face, it may as well not exist. The ads have degraded user experience in so bad ways that having a page with little content and 'next' button just to show more ads is pretty much the norm now.
> breaking the law
No one is breaking the law yet. The law has been changed, and has been changed in a way that destroys businesses and people.
Or: just make it opt-in.
