Agreed. Any site that offers me real value -- enough that I would return regularly -- is a site I'd probably give a few dollars a year to, rather than have ads. Of course, if I'm just a hit and run seeing your site once or twice a year or only once ever, then I'm not going to do anything and there is no relationship there.
Unfortunately, the problem with this is:
1) Most sites try to make the best of both options. They put ads everywhere, which essentially makes them beholden to the advertiser and not the reader and then offer an option to give them some money instead of seeing ads. That only addresses "I don't want to see 10,000 ads every day" part. It doesn't address the "I want to be your focus - not your product that you deliver to your advertisers" part.
2) Why is it that when places offer a "support us with money" option, they are so ridiculously expensive? Instead of spamming my face with ads every day, give me an option where I can go ad-free for maybe $5 a year. Nobody does that, though. They say "you can see ads or you can pay us $50/yr". Seriously, you are not getting $50 in value from advertising to me in a year, so why are you jacking up the price ten times over just so I can go without the ads?!
Ultimately, none of this matters. Internet advertising is a joke and a scam and advertisers will slowly catch on. The whole "it's super targeted you guys!" thing really isn't turning out to be that valuable and it is all rampant with fake click-farms and other inherent problems.
Also, the only thing I hate more than a huge site throwing ads in my face for their content is when every little mommy-blogger or part-time ranter on the internet with a Blogger blog has to monetize their stuff. Look, you are not making a living at this. You are not ever going to make a living at this. Why would you do something so gross as to fill a page with advertising for those six people you might get each month who actually bother to read your site?
Do people not realize that there was a time when we did things online (or even back in the BBS days) for the joy of it? For the joy of making and maintaining systems and services? Or for the joy of having people read what we have to say or make use of services we have to offer? Not only didn't we expect to make money (much less a living) from it, we actually spent plenty of our own money.
But now, if you can't monetize something, it just isn't worth doing, I guess. Gross. And you'd rather advertise to me rather than just take a buck from me in a value-for-value trade. Double gross.
PS: I pay for or donate to a number of online services and websites from RDIO and GiantBomb to a couple torrent sites, charities, and chipping in a dollar or two when I find something really special on one site or another that I really particularly appreciated. I'm not cheap. I just don't want to stare at tens of thousands of ads for 8-12hrs a day every day of my life. And, ideally, I'd also rather be a customer than a product... which I guess depends on everyone else also wanting to be a customer, but they're too cheap and would rather just look at a page that is 70% ads than give a dollar now and then.