HTML5 Video Ads are what finally switched me to ad blockers.
When people served static images and Adobe Flash videos, I could just disable auto-play of Flash, and voila, I see ads, but don't get obnoxious videos on random tabs. Now I have to block it all to get any peace.
Auto-playing video ads is just bad etiquette.
Send me a picture of what you're selling, or don't sell me anything.
This is the most important part of your post. I would be glad to find a way to pay for content that I value. I do in other realms (e.g., Netflix original programming).
But to me it comes back to a) ease-of-use and b) trust. On the former, there's a big opportunity in a way to make that seamless. One click and done. And, on the latter, trust is huge. People are using ad-blockers because publishers' sites have malicious ad networks. And now you want me to give you my credit card number!? It just doesn't work.
Until one of the news sites I regularly read was barely usable by always running on 100% CPU, which means it was not possible to open it on multiple tabs without making my computer fully unusable.
And until Google started to use video ads in my region. I figured that it would be better for the local business to block the ads as if they cluelessly start to annoy me with their video ads, they would anger and loose one of their potential and possibly already loyal customer. Beside some of the ads had very questionable moral value.
I would call this trend telefication - ad publishers want to control when people see ads and for how long. I think that this is not acceptable.
PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule.
Otherwise we will have serious censorship issue.