My guess is that without advertising, content providers would have to turn to a subscription-based model. I would actually like to see this, because it means a lot of sites would finally die off. Take any website (IGN, Gamespot, Gamefaqs) that does videogame reviews and/or guides. Most of these websites are dinosaurs - they come from a time before the Wiki model and streaming video, when people had to go to them to get reviews.
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Nowadays, if I want to find out how to do something in a game or whether a game is worth playing, I can go on Youtube and look it up - usually resulting in better quality than a published guide or review on one of those sites.
That's all well and good. But without advertising, YouTube wouldn't exist. At least not in the form it currently does. Someone ha to pay for all that video storage and bandwidth. Same with Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, even slashdot. Advertising provides market fluidity, where the tiniest action by a visitor (a click or even pausing on a page to read it) can be translated directly into additional revenue to the site for providing content visitors find "interesting." Maybe there's a better way to provide this fluidity than ads - if you find it you'll probably become the next dot-com billionaire. But ignorance of this beneficial side of ads does not negate their usefulness.
On the receiving end, as much as I dislike ads, I do acknowledge that they free me up to try out different sites at no cost. With a subscription model, I'd have to pay to subscribe to a site to try it out (or get in on a limited-time free trial, which would probably involve me giving the site my mailing address and phone number which they could sell to marketers - probably worse than seeing ads online). There's also a small informational benefit to ads. I found that out when I got rid of my TV. A year later I was hanging out with some friends and we decided to go see a movie. That's when I realized I had absolutely no idea what movies were playing, and even when I was told the titles I couldn't classify them into categories I might find interesting (sci-fi, action, etc). My friends had to take the time to give me a 10-second summary of each movie before I could tell them if I was voting yea or nay on it.
In the time it took me to read that, I could look up a video on Youtube and see the same thing done in less than thirty seconds and without terrible ASCII art - and without ads plastered all over.
I think your gripe is more about artificially limiting the FAQs so they can't include pictures. Except for linear 3D guides (e.g. jumping puzzles), video is also a terrible format for guides. Video is a time-dependent format, whereas a written page with pictures allows you to quickly skim forward and back to find the section you want. It's the same reason you can quickly browse a directory full of unnamed pictures to get an idea of what's there, but you can't do the same for a directory full of MP3s. The pictures are time-independent and you can quickly scan through them. MP3s (and video) are time-dependent, and you have to sit there and listen/watch them at something close to real-time to figure out what the content is.