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Comment by drey08 | Hacker News Reader

That could actually be a novel technique against ad blocking. Make the website dysfunctional if the ads can't be displayed.

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Many sites do this. Baseball-reference is one of them.

Yeah, having an option to pay for the site instead would just be crazy.

Having to pay to visit all of the sites out there which are currently using ads would pretty much ruin the internet for most people. Having a big banner at the top asking for donations seems to work rather well, though. See gnu.org and wikipedia.org for examples (though Wikipedia's donation campaign this year is a bit excessive IMO).

FYI, you can hide the Wikipedia donation campaign banners by putting this in a userscript that @matches http://*.wikipedia.org/*:

    setTimeout(function() {
        fundraisingBanner.hide();
    }, 1000);

Or just sign into your wikipedia account.

This ublock custom rule worked for me:

  ||https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/special:bannerloader

I consider them ads and use adblock to block those as well.

Google's actually testing this out - http://consumerist.com/2014/11/20/googles-new-contributor-fe...

Doomed to fail since Google takes a chunk and it still leaves all the content available to anyone with adblock. It'll get some small use I'm sure but not enough to be notable.

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