You don't have to see ads to not want to visit places that inundate others with them. Also, having an ad blocker should not give you the false impression that you aren't seeing ads on the web.

Yes, I do because I prefer compensating content creators, because otherwise we will not have many of those. If some website has shitty ads (blinking banners, auto-playing videos, malware etc), I just avoid those sites altogether.

Since you seem to be someone who doesn't see ads on the web, I am curious to know how you pay for the content you consume? I have come across very few non-ads options which work well. For me, subscription fatigue sets in across various video-on-demand sites and various high-quality newspapers. But for a lot of my family / friends across the globe, subscription charges are high enough that they would rather see ads.

I try my best to contribute for things I care about. I'll send the occaisionally donation into the guardian, ETF, Patron for a youtuber, wikipedia, or whatever. I do have a couple subscriptions like for Spotify or the economist, but otherwise I try to give to stick to donations whenever I feel like I have money to burn.

That being said, I live with the fact that certain content creators get nothing from me, I don't feel great about it but I would never consume their content if I had to go through ads, either.

Its funny to note that many people here complain about Google preventing page views, but have no restraint in doing the same by blocking ads. Pot meet kettle...

Blocking ads doesn't prevent page views, it prevents viewing garbage along with the pages.

These are not comparable practices.

Google is a search monopoly. Republishing search results to keep users on Google (rather than the publisher) is literally stealing content and the pageviews the content generated.

As a user, blocking programmatic ads (such as those served by ad marketplaces) is the only way to browse the web safely.

Websites are free to use affiliate links, subscriptions, donations, non-marketplace ads, or any other safe monetization strategy. I will not apologize for blocking the unsafe monetization strategies.

Specifically, we already know how to display ads:

  <a href="..."><img src="..."/></a>

Anything which uses javascript to display ads is by definition malware, and should be treated accordingly.