You're talking about killing the primary income source for publishers. That's writers, bloggers, journalists, experts of all stripes who want to make a living from creating content.

Donations don't do it because nobody donates (tragedy of the commons). And most content creators are terrible at marketing and have no idea how to create their own products and sales funnels (and would be hard-pressed to expertly monetize them if they did).

We're left with ads. Without those, the web goes back to being abandoned by professional content creators, and instead becomes the domain of Tumblr/YouTube/Imgur, the new Usenet/Angelfire/Geocities.

The solution I suspect is most likely if ad blocking becomes too ubiquitous and publishing companies are finding it too hard to make money online is that publishing companies all get behind a locked (non-plug-in-able) browser that users cannot block the ads from. If you want to surf the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or the Economist or read the links on HN, Reddit, or Google News, you fire up your Media Browser and click the links and suck up the ads as a necessary evil. Click those links in a non-approved browser and you see a message saying, "Please install Media Browser to view this article." If you don't feel like looking at ads, you stick to your regular browser and surf Tumblr. But almost everyone will install Media Browser and watch the ads.

That said, I don't think the arms race ever ends. There will always be people who need to find a way to get paid to create content, and there will always be people who don't want to pay. That race goes on forever.

Honestly, a lot of the professional content on the web today is awful. I say let it burn. I've met quite a few people who attempt to ~"get rich quick" or "retire early" off of something which passionate hobbyists did for the love of it. They might be "professionals" in the sense that they're now attempting to use such an enterprise as their sole source of income, but much of this "professional" content is garbage.

Hobbyist blogs, on the other hand, typically have great content, because the people writing it created it out of a desire to share their knowledge, not to drive ad clicks. There can be some overlap, and I've definitely seen what I would consider good content with ads on the side, but I largely believe that content created to drive ad revenue is a business which pollutes the web. Tumblr, GeoCities, etc had / have a ton of awesome content, and it's not typically the creators who are getting paid to put it there. YouTube does share ad revenue above a certain threshold, and I think that works pretty well.

i kind of wish lots of online "presences" would go back to being paper - based. So much shit, it's clogging the tubes.

There will always be a place for advertisements, the methodology needs to change. Companies like "doubleclick.net" are dead, they just don't know it yet.

Direct advertising still works. When the ads are sourced from the same domain as the content, blocking them is essentially impossible. This means a bit more work on the part of content providers, they have to solicit advertisement revenue directly, but many of those companies have been doing that for decades (newspapers). Shouldn't be too difficult.

That sort of advertising is less offensive as well, because it's more likely to be relevant and safe.