Actually I'm not too surprised that people turned off their adblockers when you asked them. That's what I'm saying - engage with people and if you get on their wavelength they'll respond positively.
I wasn't sure how you'd take my comment, but I'm encouraged by your response. Some comments by Ars in the original DOI thread were offensive ("f*ing Wladimir Palant"), your reply restores my faith.
When I surf the internet, most sites I visit I don't build up a particular relationship with. I'll just read an article here or there. I won't read through all the terms and conditions or turn off adblockers for every site I visit, life's too short. But if it turns out Ars provides a useful service in the future, I just might if you guys ask nicely like this. I still question the sustainability of this strategy, but then again I don't run a successful web site, so who am I to say.
Thanks again for the positive response, and good luck.
You may be shocked to hear this, but most of our readers responded really well to Ken's post the other day. We had about 50x as many new subscribers since Friday as we've ever had over an equivalent amount of time. We also saw a noticeable increase in our ad views/pageviews ratio.
It's good that you donated to TechDirt, I love seeing people throw some money towards sites they love. We've run donation systems in the past and they haven't really been worth maintaining, but I'm sure we'll consider running them again. Selling services for a fixed price seems to work quite a bit better, even if those services are "see our site ad free, minus the guilt".