I have made a few tools originally created for internal use at the business I work at (mainly shipping-related documentation). I made them because I couldn't find them anywhere else that met my needs. I realized others would find them useful, and I was right, because more than 500 people visit and use the sites each day. And the use of ads covers the hosting, domain names and some of my time. I wouldn't want to attempt to monetize it any other way, due to demand, time and complexity. It's a win-win situation, and ads make that possible.
My interpretation of this article was that, while there are certainly benefits to having ads as the lowest barrier to entry monetization model, there are also lots of downsides, and we would do well to come up with something else that is easy to do and works well. But nobody knows what that should or could be, or even if it is possible to do, as the other schemes thus far (paywalls, subscriptions, freemium) have lots of trade-offs. I'm personally pretty bullish on micropayments, though a good way to do them hasn't emerged yet.
If there was another option as easy to set up for your little sites that made you a similar amount of maintenance and upkeep money, would you be sad or happy to lose the ads?
