This argument has no basis, those websites don't have to die, they have to think of an alternative business model.

Some have already transitioned to crowdfunding (see patreon, the dice tower getting funded on kickstarter,...) micropayment, subscriptions.

But this case of "your failed business model is not my problem" is not to blame on adblockers alone but also on dwindling ads revenue among others reasons due to facebook driving prices down. When facebook investor story time will come to an end the whole web advertising ecosystem might crumble on itself.

OK, I prefer reasonable ad-supported to subscription.

When a site as big as Wikipedia has to spend a large chunk of each year begging for handouts, I have trouble buying your suggestion that alternative business models are generally viable.

This counter argument would be valid if wikipedia model had failed but it actually manage to fund the project for 10+ years.

The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.

IINM wikipedia has chosen a business model not based on ads which successfully funds the project for about 10+ years.

> The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.

Yes, that was my point — Wikipedia is probably the absolute best-case scenario for a free website that isn't supported by ads, and they're still panhandling. The usual ad-supported website would fare much, much worse, and would probably just stop providing its service to the world.

Wikipedia most definitely does NOT require the donations they ask for every december to continue day-to-day operations. In fact, they can survive quite comfortably on the standard donation rate they receive each month outside the December drive[1].

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fun...

I don't want them to die either; I want them to adapt, or be replaced by sites that can adapt. There's no hard dichotomy between "sites that charge users" and "sites that run ads"; some sites do neither, and still manage to survive just fine by many other means.

Take something like Google Search, a service that is ad-supported but is free to use and produces an enormous amount of value for virtually everyone on the internet. What is their business model in a post-adwords world, where they've been forced to adapt? Presumably they'd have to charge for it, which means that the poorest people on the internet would not have access to this amazing tool that we take utterly for granted now. No one likes (poorly targeted, invasive) ads, but is that world preferable?

Exactly. There are also huge problems associated with paying for many of these free services.

If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.

If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.

People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.

People also spend a lot of time defending internet advertising without considering the deluge of trash it's unleashed on the web, how it smothered the troves of information people put up there for free, because it costs almost nothing to share and benefits all[0]. The first ones that said "fuck everybody else" were the advertisers.

> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years

... wait are you trolling?

Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?

Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.

[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.

Google search is not only ad-supported, it is also ad-supporting. it is carefully designed to collect and track your every click to feed their advertising business.

I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".

In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.

> "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead"

They might have the money but why should they give it away? They are not a charity.

> it would make room for better search engines to emerge

How would those search engines fund themselves? what would their business model be?

> I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".

But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.