I also changed my mind about advertising, a few years ago. I used to not want to use an ad blocker, due to my love of defaults (one extra thing to install, messes with the page possibly breaking it etc.) but also so that I could effortlessly support the content I was consuming. But the online advertising industry has gone too far and for me at least, I don't think there is coming back. Too much manipulation, too much tracking, too many obnoxious ads, auto-playing videos, outright scams and so on. I will block any ad I can. If too many people do it and the outlet I am reading / watching videos of can't no longer afford to produce content, they can open up donations. If they still can't support the effort on donos, then I think it's time to close shop. I feel like the reality is, someone else will step in. There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized. I am happy for every one of those people who can make it their business and scale their operation up, truly. But I do not feel obliged to keep supporting them being able to produce online works as a business by giving away my privacy and sanity through being subjected by awful ads run by ad networks who think my online data is theirs and that it hasn't made its way to their database yet is a bug they need to fix.
> There are a lot of passionate people willing to put content up online just for the feeling of helping others and getting their work recognized
I had the same thought. Ads enable people who previously put up their content out of passion to do the same thing to commercial gain. Is this good or bad? On the plus side, it incentivizes the creation of more quality content. On the other hand, "labor of love" content is homier, less corporatized, and the extent to which they will help you on a given problem is not biased by their ability to earn money from said problem.
It's a similar situation between mom and pop restaurants and chains. Now it's hard to say that one or the other is definitively better -- depends on what you're looking for. I wish there were resources out there to help understand the nature of this tradeoff and how it has played out in different areas of the economy.
