Very good point, I'd never considered that!

OK, if you don't pay then money has to be found somewhere for the web to still work[1] which advertising seems to be the only source of. Payment provides that cash thus squelching the need for ads.

If they don't advertise then they don't need to track AFAICS.

If they do start advertising as well as accepting payments for non-advertising, they are going to get spanked by users withdrawing payments, and installing ad-blockers.

I'd prefer to pay, anonymously, but as people clearly won't cos they want free stuff at any cost, advertising will persist. It's a social problem not a technical one.

Anyway, I block all 3rd party ads, which is 99% of them and 100% of the bad crap, and block all JS, with a VM for the rare cases I need it on. Not totally safe but pretty close without actually unplugging.

People complain about ads presumably because they see them, but they are so damn easy to block why don't they? I just don't get the perennial complaints. Just do it, find a minimum 10X speedup... but no, it doesn't seem to happen, and they keep discovering that Free Stuff Costs.

All the stuff you wrote about people paying, or wanting free stuff, is patently false. It was proven false by Cable TV. The promise there, when it was introduced, was that by paying a subscription for your TV, you wouldn't have any ads. So people bought into it, and pretty soon, they just added the ads back in, so now they were making money both from advertisers and the viewers at the same time. And this didn't cause them to be "spanked by users" by them canceling their cable TV subscriptions. It's been decades now, and cable TV is still here, and only now is it waning, but only because of online services like Netflix, not because people were fed up with ads.

> I'd prefer to pay, anonymously, but as people clearly won't cos they want free stuff at any cost, advertising will persist. It's a social problem not a technical one.

It's more of a content quality issue. There are examples where large numbers of people will pay for quality content (example [1]). Large swathes of 'content' is junk (clickbait, listicles, submarine articles, actual fake news, etc) and few will pay for that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/24/guardian-media...