RE: Busy: Donation Terms. Introducing our Donation Levels
You're right, there are several solutions including Advertising.
I believe in a solution from the blockchain enhancements with incentive for platforms like Busy, to reduce our reliance on Donations and become autonomous.. We try to avoid Advertisement as much as possible but If it's not possible to be sustainable with donation + blockchain incentive, we have other solutions including Ads.. But as a non-profit org on Steem blockchain, being independent will still be relative.. We will always depend on the same chain as Steemit and will also depend on further enhancements.
In my opinion, unless steem face some serious growth issues (and It would mean that the Busy project has no place in the Steem ecosystem), we should be fine relying on Steemit inc support and other members/stackholder who believe in Busy to bring growth and create a new vitality with this alternative platform. It's our medium-term goal with Busy. Ads are more in our emergency plan for now, or possible when we will have huge traffic ; not to develop a Minimum Viable Product and a Beta release ;)
(Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
Note well that simply because content is in the blockchain does not mean that the author has given you any rights to profit from it. Everything I post into the blockchain, for example, I retain copyright on and reserve all rights to. Without a specific license from the owner of the content, profiting from ads displayed on/beside the content may well expose you to significant liability. Publishing data into the blockchain doesn't give everyone who downloads that blockchain the right to profit from that data.
I totally agree with your statement and vision. This is one of the reason for which we really want to avoid ads.
That's also why I didnt mention Google Ad for example but simply Advertising as a more global concept to-be-defined. Adding Advertising would require more profound reflection on the exact model considering the point you described pretty well.
Simply sharing a few thoughts with you, However it's not on Busy roadmap and may never be