I use an ad-blocker on all sites I visit (and YouTube), so ads are no problem for me at all. I prefer the free model.
As other users have stated, we need new blood and a reasonably low barrier to entry to encourage people to join, and sporadically return to, our site.
I will mention though that I do not like the new site appearance nearly as much as the old one. It just seems cold, plain, with quite a lot of wasted space on the page.
I do like the fact that each page contains more posts though, so I can just scroll instead of seeing a few posts, then having to click onto the next page. That's an improvement.