Some people - even though they themselves have profited heavily in the entrepreneurial game - seem to think that the entire world should be rearranged to suit them. Witness this, on ad supported RSS feeds:

I decided it's time to unsub from feeds that have those annoying little web bug graphics in each item, masquerading as "useful" stuff -- they're really there to send messages back to the publisher that the item was displayed in my browser.

This means that every time I read the newest stuff, my machine sends hundreds of stupid messages to ComputerWorld, Fast Company, WNYC, USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor and other sites with these bugs.

Enough. I'm on a campaign to eradicate these Feeds Of Evil from my subscription list.

Well. I've said before that the advertising model is running into problems - click fraud on the one hand, and freely available opinion pieces on the other. However, that's not to say that advertising is dead, or that it should be. I do this via corporate sponsorship, for the purpose of promoting our product. Not everyone is in that boat though - not everyone is involved in product promotion, so they don't get a "free" billboard to post on. For those people who need to directly foot the bill for hosting content, what are the options? There's pretty much two: ads, or subscription fees. People are going to pick one or the other, depending on their target audiences. Decrying the whole thing as evil is just stupid. Without some form of sponsorship, a lot of the content out there on the web would just disappear.

That doesn't mean that every form of advertising is good, or useful - some of it (those irritating fly-over ads come to mind) does actual harm to the brand in question, IMHO. In any case, the ad model is not going to go away.