Not all advertising requires clicks. Brand awareness works by finagling associations in to your brain. No matter how immune to suggestion one things they are these things work to some extent.

they become a problem for advertising networks when they are no-longer able to proved enough money to be worth the content creators time to accept/administrate.

And when a network ad-spots start drying up, the advertisers will have to switch.

at least, that's how I'd hope it would work.

Where do you expect the advertisers will switch to? Nah whats going to happen is that sites will just start doing one of two things. a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers. b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective. Embedding them in content or proxying the ads to come from the host itself.

Ads aren't going away.

> a) they will start blocking users that appear to be using ad blockers.

Fine by me. I'll simply mark it as the malware that it is and never return to that domain again.

> b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective.

This technology already exists but its ignored because harvesting and selling user data is a cash cow. This is perfectly possible today...

<a href="someplace.com"><img src="/somead.png" /></a>

Ads don't have to go away, but it's thinking like yours that leads to this adversarial atmosphere.

Many of us hope for option c - that publishers work with ad networks to fix some of the problems that drive people to ad blockers in the first place. Some people object to advertising no matter how it is done, but I think that's a relative small number of people. Most people will accept well-behaved ads.