Tons of webforums have donation links or premium memberships. People will pay for their name to be displayed in a different color and basically nothing else, and it's not super hard if you have a few hundred users to pay for servers this way.

It's a fine model so long as you don't need it to scale to one million active users.

I'm still of the opinion that the end of online advertising would be a significant net benefit to society, if for no other reason then the incentives to keep you interacting with a social network / website / app / media / etc. fade away.

> If you ban online advertising, every publisher you know and like will either exit the market or need to use a paywall (which are famously… popular and successful for niche publishers? No.)

OK.