Well, let's find out. Ads suck all of the air out of the room. If you provide your content through another business model, someone else can just copy your content and slap ads on it and make a few bucks. And because search engines function on those same ads, they're incentivized to send you to the spam sites instead of the real source of the content. If we kill ads as a business model, then we can start to explore other business models and find out what actually works.
> Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads.
No. There are other options. One example is the Patreon model. I pay for several creators who do not gate their content to payment. They make their content available to everyone, for free. I could view their content for free, but I want to encourage them to continue creating, so I pay them for it. Is it a viable option for every situation? I don't know. But the mere existence of ad-based business models means it's very difficult to explore non-ad-based solutions. For this, and a whole host of other reasons, using an ad-blocker is more ethical than not.
"Cops hate these 10 tips that save you money. #6 will surprise you"
"Take a quiz to find out which Taylor Swift boyfriend you are"
Regulation. It's a harsh measure, but I doubt there is another one. The last 20 years people tried to find alternative solutions. We have pay-walls, we have crowdfounding, we have various subscription models, I fail to see a solution that hasn't been tried, but yet every single year we get exposed to more ads. It seems extremly unlikely that there is something that could replace ads.
But what is the logical solution when there is a damaging thing in society that can't be replaced by healthy alternatives? It's regulation.
Now I know that a ban on ads seems unlikely. But I honestly don't think we have a choice. Because the alternative is that the ad-industry keeps creeping into every single aspect of our lifes, like they have done ever since their emergence. And with the advance of AR, smart homes and AI assistants this seems like a bad idea.
Of course, I wouldn't put it past regulators. In fact, copyright in EU comes close to doing exactly what the above would require.
Spotify found a solution that works for music.
Food for thought, I wonder if that works specifically for them because it's harder to block their ads. I.e. it typically takes a different level of expertise to block their ads, as compared to a browser extension (have to block their ad traffic on a network level). Or is it really something else about their product?
As a counter example, I don't pay for youtube premium. Definitely part of the reason behind that is because it's easy to block them so long as I'm watching in a browser.
I personally use ad blockers. Right now I'm browsing with Ghostery and AdBlock. I'm surprised that only 27% of people use them currently. Makes me want to check out my parents computers when I visit next and make sure they have an ad blocker installed. But back to the questions, does this mean that the contract between websites their visitors is inherently broken? Is the current situation a race to the bottom? Is that tenable? What's the alternative?