I think they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these days. Neither do I. While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth, security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing.

In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.

Absolutely. The number of people who would still resort to blocking ads if they were non-targeted, static, tastefully done yet clearly recognizable as advertisements, served locally, non-tracking, and non-obtrusive would probably have been negligible. But now there is an entire economy that depends on advertisements that track you and know you and need to be served via third party brokers, because if they didn't they wouldn't sell.

I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.

If you put a static ad image hosted on your own server on the page, something like http://wired.com/img/jhfkfhfuhi34cn2.jpg, ad blocker will not be able to distinguish it from other images and won't block it.

There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design.

Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad network script there and be done with it, no targeted ads, tracking etc - basically everything people don't like and a reason to use ad blockers.

It's amazing why they don't just do this. Part of the reason why is that ad blocking is so easy, so most people will just do it... especially if it has the added benefit of removing the 5 second delay on YouTube videos due to ads.

But I don't care enough to wipe out static in page ads, especially since those don't have the added cost of tracking me anymore than visiting the site does. In short, I still wouldn't like those adds, but I would like them a lot more than the ads I currently block.

I think adblockers block content which usually is offsite, so it's not a matter of "technical concern".

EDIT: rephrase