Google ads look like results and link to sites with malicious software downloads. iOS apps are full of "you have one unread message!" misinformation banners. These are the 'reputable' players, of course grandma also plays bridge online while little Johnny searches for boobs on the family laptop. What do their ads link to?
In this world the solution is just block freaking everything.
Android isn't any better.
I have used adblock for years now, practically since I started using the internet. About 2 sites are whitelisted: hackaday and reddit. They show reasonable ads. I absolutely hate flamboyant flashing ads. Especially those that go full-screen on mouse-over.
If all ads where like the ads on reddit and HaD I wouldn't complain, I proably wouldn't even have an adblocker. But that malicious bulk? No thank you.
That's the part I'm less certain about. I would've expected it to happen already; they're hurting themselves, but so far not fatally.
Yes, it would collapse the current web business model. I fully support this.
Default to showing all the content, but let people make their own choice on what to filter out.
But advertising itself has always been at least partially evil, which makes Google's slogan combined with its utter reliance on advertising revenue a problem.
What is sad is that obvious marketing attempts work so well. One weird trick ads really do work. I was as surprised as anyone when we started running these for a client assuming that they would fail and we could stop. Sales nearly doubled for that ad group.
It's hard to blame the marketers for the dumbed down advertising when it works so well.
Malicious advertising is probably the biggest driver of AdBlock Plus growth. Anecdotally, we just had another customer get hit by a remote computer service scam because she searched for something like "canon ink technical support", and an ad was listed at the top with an 800 number that she called without realizing that it wasn't Canon at all.
Google does its best to differentiate its ads from its search results as little as possible. A lot of less savvy computer users never even notice the little "Ad" tag; I had to point it out to her. In Yahoo's case, it's even worse -- the difference between the pile of ads at the top of their page and their search results is so subtle it even took me a moment to figure it out.
And then there's saturation. Advertising is everywhere now. Magazines spend as much print area on advertising as content; television is down to, what, 10 minutes of ads for every 20 minutes of content, or worse; radio, if you're silly enough to still listen to that, is hilariously bad; news sites and publications are experimenting with "sponsored content" -- ads that more and more closely resemble regular articles -- billboards, bulk mailing, text messages, robocalls, and email spam all add to the load.
On the whole, the ad industry ends up feeling skeezy, pushy, and overwhelming.
So AdBlock Plus gives users a way to remove all of that from one part of their daily life. I don't think we've ever had a negative response from a user when showing them AdBlock Plus for the first time; the usual response when reloading yahoo.com or msn.com with AB+ is, "oh, wow, that's really nice."
I keep expecting to hear that the bottom's fallen out of online advertising.