I think ad blockers are one of the best inventions since sliced bread; they make online browsing so much more pleasant. It annoys me to click on a website and have the gigantic PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR AD BLOCKER notice pop up, hiding the article I want to read. Since it always irks me, I simply click away from the website-- I showed them! I realize that these sites use ads to produce revenue, but I'm not interested enough to allow them to bombard me with advertising. I just clicked on Yahoo and my ad blocker shows 21 advertisements blocked. Seriously?? That's more ads than articles. (Luckily I don't see them.) Just venting.
Sometimes on here, people post link to magazine or news sites. If the site requires me to stop my ad blocker, I just leave the site as well. There is also an ad blocker people apparently use for YouTube, but I think it keeps the channel poster from making money. I pay the monthly fee for that one since I use it so much. I would find the constant ads too annoying.
My Firefox ad-ons, Ad-Block Plus and Ad Blocker Ultimate, block practically everything... even the Youtube ads. I don't pay for anything I don't have to.
I have ad block with my McAffee security. But I don't mind a few unobtrusive ads if it's something I'm really interesting in seeing. When I go to WRALTV.com , my Raleigh channel, it asks me to turn off my ad blocker. I don't mind doing that because it keeps my viewing that info free.
Let me give you another side of that argument. For the first couple of decades, the Internet was full of informational sites. People spent hours every day writing informative, clever content for their websites. Newspaper and magazine sites that had an Internet presence offered their content for free. Rather than hiding content behind a pay-wall, these contents were free for anyone who wanted to read, and there was a lot of good stuff to read. The business model was based on advertising. My wife and I once earned from $200-300 a month from Amazon.com ads alone, plus another couple of hundred from Google ads, and the best adverting model was to have no more than two ads per page, and no pop-ups or pop-unders; just a small ad on the top of the page and another somewhere in the body. Because of adblockers, there aren't nearly as many informative sites anymore, and most of the newspaper sites are behind a pay-wall. In order to make money online today, you have to have the money to create something like Facebook, where your adblockers don't work. As adblockers for places like YouTube become more effective and prominent, all of the good content on YouTube will go away.
That's my point, @Ken Anderson . Birds and Blooms magazine used to have a free site. The ads paid for it. It was an excellent site. Eventually, so many people used ad blockers that they were losing money so they closed the site. I never used an ad blocker there and told other members that they would close it if all the ads were blocked. If the ads are unobtrusive, I don't mind them at all.
Uh-huh. Even for people who aren't paying salaries and trying to earn a living from their websites, it costs money to have a site online, whether you buy software to put it together or pay someone to put it together for you, hosting fees, upgrades, promotions, and so on, and most people just can't spend both their time and their money with nothing in return. So you have the big money sites, the government sites, institutional sites, and those from non-profits who are getting grants. That greatly changes the kind of content that is available. That may have much to do with the fact that we have no objective news. Since no one wants to see an ad on a page, and most people aren't willing to pay for it, the news is sponsored by the agenda organizations who will pay to put their propaganda out there.
I have an ad blocker but it doesn't block all ads. For that I'd have to instal an "ultimate" version. I'm satisfied the way it is. I have all the ads on my phone, though, because I'm too lazy to use a blocker there. As for paying, it turns out that there's hardly any content that I'd be willing to pay for in order to be allowed to read it. So, like Beth & Bess (doesn't that sound nice? ), I instantly leave a site that wants me to pay or even register. After all, there hasn't been a "must read" site or content so far or me. I'm not mean, though, I once paid a fee for a forum that had offered free access as a teaser before you were forced to pay. I did that but it wasn't worth it. I didn't see the extra benefit for the money. Guess it all depends. If no free content was available anymore, I'd probably pay. That's not the problem. The problem is content worthwhile paying for. I have a hunch that that can only be content generated by myself.