How much do you think you'll make from ads? Chances are, much, much less than you expect. There are exceptions (e.g. plentyoffish.com), but people I know who run popular niche sites (in the low millions of page views per month, a few tens-of-thousands unique) are happy when they manage to make $1,000/month from ads.
Actually I have no idea. Never made any money from ads, but $1k/month sounds like the kind of money I could use to improve/market the game I'm working on.
There is also another question with the same roots - how much money do the sites I read need to make in order to work and maintain the same quality. I'd be glad to pay something like an equivalent of what I'm worth as an advertisement target. There was Google Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) project but I don't know the current status.
Anyway, I have recently deleted my adblock. Not having it, ads are super annoying on some sites and I miss it, but I see no other way to discourage paywalling good, free content.
The reality is that a large quantity of people will continue blocking ads, so your contribution will amount to nil, unless you can get a non-blocking movement going.
The unfortunate thing is no matter how much we decide to not block ads, the ad companies will continue to take advantage of us with extremely intrusive, unvetted (for safety) ads. You give them an inch, they take a mile. I'm not willing to give them that inch. They will not reciprocate.
If all ad networks were tidy and nice, like The Deck network, I probably wouldn't block ads. But my pre-adblock experience WITH ads is what caused me to block them.
The advertisers had their chance and they blew it. I could care less if all ad-supported sites go away now. You're in bed with ad company scum, you deserve what you get.
If they want to ruin the user experience. I will force the user experience to be better with an ad-blocker.
I understand some content (especially content available for those that are underprivileged) may go away if ad-blocking continues to grow. I don't know the solution, but the solution isn't more ads or not blocking them. Maybe there's some other way... shrug
How about the worst of both worlds? I subscribe to the NYT and log into their site with a paid-for account to get around the paywall and still see ads everywhere.
The incentives set up by Google Contributor are to increase ads. It's about getting a micro-donation system that excludes sites that don't use Google Ads, so the idea is to force sites to show more ads in order to participate with Google Contributor and to punish sites for not showing ads.
I support your arguments of free content, but there are some sites on the internet that will serve you spam if you don't use a ad blocking software.
I unblock ads on the free websites that I use frequently which present ads in a nice way.
Some websites do show a popup that they earn from ads and it would be great if you could turn off your ad blocker and I mostly comply with that. The reason for this is that these sites know when and where to show ads.
