Subscriptions have been 'the new black' and a mainstay of my income since 2000 or so, but subscriptions do not lend themselves to all kinds of content.<p>Advertising has always been a way to make otherwise losing propositions profitable, and as long as there are companies marketing products there will be advertising. It would be wasteful not to tap in to those dollars.<p>As Patio11 elsewhere already pointed out adsense is a form of micropayments, and micropayments are the 'pay-as-you-go' of subscriptions.<p>The only problem with that is that adsense is not transparent and it doesn't allow you to set your own price. In fact, you don't even know how much your inventory is really worth.<p>So if your site does not have a very tight coupling between the users and the sites, one that you expect to last for many months or years advertising is actually a very good solution, but adsense in particular may not be the best you can do.<p>Another problem with adsense is the fact that clickfraud benefits both google <i>and</i> the fraudsters, so for advertisers it is very difficult to track whether they're spending their money correctly or not.<p>I wished someone would start to give google some serious competition in this space.