You can not claim any moral ground at all. Claiming that web sites will fold if you don't exist is like a drug dealer claiming that taking them off the street will make life worse for the drug addicts.
Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.
I would like to see a micropayment system where I can load up a few dozen dollars a month and pay shares through +1 or liking pages. Sure, 1/1000 of my $50/month isn't going to make much of a difference, but if you are getting paid through ad impressions you will get a similar monthly return.
Even better, you will make more money by producing content people like, with reduced incentive to split a five word article over six pages of ads.
These days the ads are to the point that if I see a site start janking around as the stylesheets load and ads start pushing content around, I just force quit Safari right there on the spot. I don't have the time or money to support a web fuelled by the advertising dollar.
> Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.
But that's the point - they won't adapt in the direction that you want and they won't die. Why? Because you're not punishing the bad actors. Expect ad-blockers to stop working in the coming months. They only worked until now because they weren't considered to be mainstream ;-)
> I would like to see a micropayment system ...
Right, because that would solve the privacy thing. Micropayment systems for rewarding websites and projects with donations have already been tried and it's not working. For one because people claiming this never put their money where their mouth is. And also because the pool of people that can afford to spend $50 a month on reading websites is not that big, as we're speaking about the middle-class living in first-world countries, many of whom as I said don't give a shit.
#firstWorldSolutions
Except that I'm the one paying for the traffic, through my ISP. If carriers complain that there's too much traffic for the money they're paid, that's an issue of not charging the user enough for the service being provided.
I can always pay more money for more quota.
I still can not understand the mentality of US mobile service providers who just give you one-price-fits-all service. They're selling a limited resource (i.e.: consumption of broadcast bandwidth), but don't charge the heavy users more than the light users.
It's foolishness like that that makes ISPs start thinking about charging high volume content originators for use of their network.
If I choose to not download certain parts of your web site (e.g.: the JavaScript and third party resources), that's my way of controlling costs. It's not up to my ISP to make that decision for me (much less start charging content providers for the privilege of transit).
Find a better way to fun the web site. We are engaged in a tech war which is going to end up with users turning off CSS and JavaScript. Then how will you feed ads to people?
UX will win.
It will end up in better quality for everyone if only those products people are willing to pay for exist.
For one, while certain websites or apps show a clear signal that can be used (e.g. coding, hence the user can be shown ads on coding tools), many other websites or apps are not giving a signal on preferences or intent, this besides the ads inventory being an issue.
For example when you're reading political news, or when you're playing chess, what ad could you be shown that could be related to politics or chess? I can answer this - without a user profile, best case scenario is that you're shown something at random, with a disastrous conversion rate. And worst case scenario is ads being used for spreading pieces of propaganda on controversial issues and I remember for example how a certain gold mining company was attempting to manipulate with downright lies the viewers of certain YouTube videos that were criticizing their open-pit project. And because such ad spots are basically worthless, they can be bought for cheap.
I'm personally all about privacy and the security of my data, being downright paranoid. But privacy is one thing, blocking ads is another. If you don't like ads, then don't use those services or websites. That's how you end up rewarding alternatives and personally I rewarded many alternatives that way. Even if you want to punish bad actors, you still give them the eyeballs, you still distribute those links to your friends, etc. The concept of voting with your wallet is basically broken.
And contrary to the music and film industry that has pushed for DRM, this time people that block ads don't have the proper moral ground to stand on and also the industry is not going to go down without a fight. Consider that you can't block ads in mobile apps without having root privileges. This will turn out to be a whack-a-mole game and it won't last for long. Just wait until these websites will start to serve ads from their own domain, with ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content ... oh wait, this is already happening ;-)
Worst of all is that you end up hurting other people - from publishers, many of whom are already on the verge of bankruptcy, to people that will suffer the consequences even if they don't use ad-blockers, as the history of video gaming can teach us. Do you enjoy the DRM laden pay-to-win gaming industry that others have created for you? As personally I'm thankful that I've outgrown video games.