Are you stupid? Nobody wants this!
The results of our user survey say something different. Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising. They will disable this feature and that's fine. The other users replied that they would accept some kinds of advertising to help websites. Some users are even asking for a way to enable Adblock Plus on some websites only.
https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
That page is the real article, linked from the first paragraph of the submitted article, which is more like a changelog.
Please also note that Wladimir has been talking about this for years and didn't suddenly get this into his head. From a 2009 post:
As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry. ... So the idea is to give control back to the users by allowing them to block annoying ads. Since the non-intrusive ads would be blocked less often it would encourage webmasters to use such ads, balance restored.
In return for some sort of consideration and a pledge to only provide "acceptable" advertising, Wladmir will unblock your ads by default in AdBlock Plus:
> We have agreements with some websites and advertisers that only advertising matching our criteria will be used, their ads will be unblocked then. We hope to grow our list significantly over time.
Given that selling advertisements runs entirely contrary to the purpose of "Adblock", and that Wladimir's incentives are now inversely aligned with the user's incentives, I imagine we're going to see the same descent into increasingly obtrusive advertising that you almost always see once an organization heads down this path.
In fact, as a result of this article I've just installed AdBlock Plus for the first time since it now does, by default, exactly what I've always wanted in a blocking tool - and I appreciate as a feature the fact that it required exactly zero configuration to do so.
That aside, I wish to address the "free content" dichotomy (either we accept ads, or we lose free content ).
First of all, the content is not free; there are both tangible and intangible costs to you; advertising is funded through higher prices on the products we buy, and there are the intangible costs to being inundated with ads.
Second, advertising is surely not the only viable model. If adblocking were to actually succeed in undermining the web advertising industry, it would also provide impetus for the development of low-resistance web payment mechanisms, similar to the app stores and in-app purchasing that have revolutionized content purchasing on mobile devices.
In other words: 100% blocking of advertisements would not lead to the loss of "free" (but not really free) content, it would merely lead to the establishment of a more direct and efficient mechanism for funding that content.
First of all: You can opt out of that feature with minor hassle. I usually don't like opt-in by default features, but here he has a point, imo.
Now - if you opt out, where is your problem with the change? If he would break future versions of AdBlock to force ads on you, someone would step up and make sure that there's an AdBlockBlock plugin.
Are you, by chance, using applications on the mobile OS of your choice that displays ad to gain revenue?
Whether that results in Adblock plus plus or not isn't something I tried to address, though the eventuality seems likely.
> Are you, by chance, using applications on the mobile OS of your choice that displays ad to gain revenue?
No. Few apps of any quality push ads, as they're incredibly detrimental to the UX on such a small screen device.
Now it's fine to be critical and to dislike that change, but I considered your 'he takes money (according to another subthread that's planned but not the case just yet) and that will lead to more and more ads being "okay"' too - simple.
Mobile apps w/ ads: Angry Birds on Android?
Well, the fact that he plans to financially benefit from displaying advertisements (or allowing them to be displayed) is key to understanding the alignment of his incentives: money for ads, insofar as his userbase will put up with it.
> Mobile apps w/ ads: Angry Birds on Android?
Haven't played it; I'd assumed it was a paid game. It's 99 cents on iOS. Unclear why it's free on Android.
I'd actually use a blacklisting mode for ABP where I could use the regular lists, but only for selected websites.
* 43% (agree) to 70% (somewhat agree) believe ABP should block more ads
* 54% (important) to 82% (somewhat important) use ABP because they care about privacy. Yet they do not require the whitelisted parties to have "Do Not Track" support because they "are not yet in a position to enforce that requirement"--of course they wouldn't because the first thing they whitelisted are Google Ads which will never support "Do Not Track".
* his assertion that it needs to be default because the majority of users "never change any settings" is simply false: 63% of users already sometimes disable ABP all by theirselves on a website, 56% manage their filter preferences, 63% change the blockable items list and 60% adds or removes filter subscriptions.
Really, I think it's absolutely awesome that a software developer holds a survey to find out which way future development of an open-source project should go, but he might just as well saved himself the trouble if he's just going to ignore the data he doesn't agree with.
Finally, the result that "only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising" is mentioned nowhere in either of the three posts about this survey. So there's no way to tell what question(s) this number is based on, what the alternative answers were or whether these other 75% of people consider SEDO domainsquatting ads "acceptable" or not.
Finally there's Wladimir Palant repeatedly asserting he doesn't actually have any experience conducting surveys, as evidenced by the lack of methodology (while taking a rather negative defensive heels-in-the-sand position towards anyone who questions him, or comments on the survey), and especially the nearly unreadable pie and stacked bar charts (only the two worst choices for pretty much any kind of data visualisation and they make Edward Tufte cry). And then there's the "mysterious" case of the non-English users that got a translated survey selecting the "I don't know/What is this?" option much more often! Gee ..
edit: This comment wasn't supposed to come over as rude, but given the downvotes and rereading it, I guess it probably does. Apologies.
(and yes, i'm aware that this comment adds just as little or less to the discussion as its parent does.)
Advertisers are noticing it too. And it will become a whac-a-mole game, in which advertisers will come up with creative ways to get around ADP or publishers will just block users with ADP enabled, or just setup a paywall.
We are indeed tired of intrusive advertising. But some websites are good citizens and shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of others. It wouldn't be in our long-term interest.
For example - Reddit is a good citizen. It only has an image in their right toolbar. Many times they just advertise for other reddits you might be interested in, which is also cool. I even clicked it a number of times.
So why punish websites like Reddit for the mistakes of others? We shouldn't. Reddit provides a valuable service too and the developers working on it need salaries too. And there are other websites like Reddit, also good citizens. It is in our interest to reward these websites - this way advertisers will start getting a clue.
* It's not becoming popular. It's about 1% of users.
* It's trivial to get around. Other options would be for
webmasters to give Adblocking users a watered down
version or just serve them up crapply encoded
videos/images etc
If adblock ever became popular, webmasters would quickly
work around it, and you'd have an arms race, with the
webmasters winning.
* Adblock probably blocks 50% of adverts. The other 50%
people don't realize are adverts.
One percent of whose users? That fails to account for the audiences of specific websites. If it's 1% for all browser users, I bet you that tech related websites are seeing much, much larger percentages.
Let's not pretend this is a "early adopter tech people know how to block ads, the masses will surely follow in time" thing. It's not.
You'd find similar massive disconnects if you asked who has a TV, who loves "Transformers" movies, and so on.
I'm not saying every tech people uses it, of course (I don't), but without data I think the existence of a strong correlation between the two is a fair assumption.
AdBlock filters and censors content. Personally, that's why I don't use it. I don't want to see a censored internet, I want to see it as it was intended to be seen. If that means I get pissed with a website doing intrusive advertising and never go back there, then that's a good thing, as it's good feedback for that website. There is more than enough choice on the internet which means I will go to websites that play nice.
Adblock usage has been around 1% for the last few years, so I don't see any sign it'll increase.
</rant>
The problem is that this 1% aren't evenly distributed -- some websites are inevitably going to have more Adblock users than others, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that some large sites (reddit?) are hitting 20%.
It's trivial to get around.
Being hostile to their users/customers doesn't seem to be working all that well for the music industry, and just adds to a general feeling of resentment. It is not clear that the result would be any different in another content industry.
I don't think you can compare to the music industry. Blocking all 'advertising', regardless of whether it's intrusive, useful, etc, is a stupid and naive move by adblock users. Not to mention bad for the free open internet. Thankfully though most people agree that blocking all advertising is not the way forward.
Which is why I don't understand the "anti-corporate" attitude of redditors. I've seen few commercial ads on Reddit because they do a lot of self-promotion. They only have a single box in which ads happen. Those ads are also tasteful and relevant to the subreddits involved. Sometimes they are useful.
I understand being annoyed of ads, but blocking Reddit is a political statement. It's as if you're saying that you want all ads to be completely gone from the net. But seriously, the only general-purpose alternative that would work as a replacement are paywalls. I doubt many redditors have thought this through.
Which is why this move by the AdBlock+ developers surprises me - suddenoutburstofcommonsense (as Slashdot would put it).
Sigh.
It seems pretty clear that in general redditors are anti-corporate and tautologous that the crowd at reddit would be different if ads had been there from the start.
That is actually a REALLY good idea - serve up smaller, low resolution content and let me easily BUY the higher resolution content (as a download, not some kind of time-limited thing) via a micropayment scheme.
That sounds better than an ad-supported model to me. However, I disagree with the idea that webmasters will "win" this battle - filtering proxies will just get more prevalent, smarter and easier for the average user to install and run. All my LANs already use Privoxy and I'm toying with enforcing it via Group Policy / WPAD / PAC.
The distinction between ads and content is one that is ridiculously easy to close if needed.
The only reason that adblock works on a good number of adverts is that they're usually served from an external source. If you serve them from exactly the same place the content is coming from, and make no distinction between the two, then filtering becomes more problematic.
I'm especially dubious of the 50% figure.
I've never used AdBlock despite being aware of it from the start because I've always felt it breaks the economics of the web. If it becomes a tool to weed out the bad apples while not punishing the rest, I'll actually start using it.
Lots of people still have no clue about this company. How will new users perceive it moving forward?
Edit: just saw https://flattr.com/ linked below. The problem with their execution (unless they do this already and I missed it) is that they don't stick a flattr button on every site. They should do this, and if a site isn't registered with them alert the donating user of the fact. If the donating user cares enough to contact the site owner in question they can sign up and get their money, otherwise at the end of some period it goes back to the user.
Edit2: Ah, looks like they do have an unclaimed feature. Yay! Everyone who uses the excuse of allowing ads to support the site should use flattr and make a direct known contribution instead of an unknown one. https://flattr.com/unclaimed
Sedo may be a crappy company, but their ads are not intrusive (no popunders, no auto-play videos).
If a domain doesn't exist, I don't end up on any site. In fact, for me it's natural to see either "Nope, doesn't exist" or ~something~, even if it's a squatter. Redirecting requests for non-existing domains would be far more distracting and insulting for me.
I understand that there's room for both and for discussion, but please understand that your use case is not 'the one'.
My point was that domain squatting sucks. Both our expected outcomes (Google search, no page displayed) get replaced by some page full of ads for very vaguely related topics.
I am actually working in my free time on creating a database of such domain squatters and on better ways to combat them ;-)
Please slap me with proof that I'm wrong, I so wish to be wrong.
Google's text ads certainly aren't intrusive.
But still I stand by previous comment, it needs to be said and from his blog entry and reply to inquiry in the comments section, the collaboration between him and ad providers is clearly implied and if true, conflict of interests is a glaring problem.
An ad for a local garage? Fine. But I would class "Mom discovers new TEETH WHITENING solution! Don't listen to your DENTIST! CLICK HERE TODAY!" to be pretty distracting and intrusive.
Edit: Come on... life is full of distraction. When you go shopping do you shut your eyes in case you see "SALE AT PENNYS!!!", or do you just ignore things that don't interest you? Jeez
> Confidence is good, because there's no understating the importance of the deal for Mozilla. The search deal with Google accounted for roughly 100ドル million of Mozilla's 123ドル million in sales for 2010. That's a whopping 84 percent.
That made it very easy for me to understand which claim you were questioning, and so either correct myself or provide further information.
There is a whitelist, mentioned in the FAQ, which lists a few companies which made it there: https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
Additionally (but the FAQ omits to mention it), a business partner of ABP can obtain a key - adding <html data-adblockkey="XXXXXKEYXXXXX_XXXXXSIGNATUREXXXXX"> to his page, which will whitelist the content.
The main author Wladimir Palant then replies to the transparency concerns raised on the thread about this solution:
"Adding each domain name to the list individually simply wouldn't have been possible. The implementation is pretty complicated to make sure that this feature doesn't get abused - only one company can use this filter (because they have the corresponding private key) and we have a contractual agreement with them concerning how they can use it."
"We hope that the demand will be high :)"
I think this is a viable truce between people who hate ads and people who make ads. The only people who suffer from this on-going war to increase the snr of the Internet are website owners themselves.
1) Does AdBlock developers get, directly or indirectly, any benefits from a third party because of this change? (Including, but not exclusively, money/donation/jobs/whatever by an entity supported by ads like Google, continued inclusion in the Chrome store, etc.)? Or any negative consequences if the change wasn’t implemented?
Wladimir Palant: I don't think that we get anything yet but we indeed hope to get some income this way to make the project sustainable. This doesn't mean that paying us is the requirement to be added to the exceptions list - the requirements a formulated here and they will probably become more precise as we gain experience (suggestions are welcome). As to Google: no, they have nothing to do with it. We didn't talk to Google, we didn't take money from them, there is no conspiracy here. We did look at Google Ads as a typical example (unblocking them is the most common request we get yet most people lack the knowledge for that) but they don't meet our requirements at the moment. Google's search ads are a different thing and they can meet our requirements depending on how the website configures them - and we did add an exception for them on one particular website.
2) If the goal is to allow people who would like to see ads to see them, why not have asked if people wanted to see them (ie, neutral "yes/no" question), rather than pushing a default setting which shows those "non intrusive" ads?
Wladimir Palant: We made some bad experience when asking people to make a decision, quite frequently people would ignore the question on the first-run page for one reason or another and then wonder why Adblock Plus "isn't working". In fact, that's the reason why the first-run page was reworked - rather than asking, we now subscribe people to a filter list automatically and allow them to revert the decision easily (simplifying Filter Preferences dialog was an important requirement for that). It's the same with "acceptable ads" - asking people to make a decision when it might be a wrong time, when they don't know what we are asking about (I tried to keep the explanation page short but it certainly isn't) etc. isn't going to work well. Instead we focused on making opt-out as simple as possible at any time.
...sooo, instead you default a feature that WILL make people go "it isn't working!!!", really?
I am sorry, this is way too much polit-speak and shows that they have just become too big, too popular. But this should change sooner or later now.
It works. I have no complaints at all. If I ever want to block those ads, I can just check a checkbox.
If AdBlock Plus also offered a choice when installed (I don't know if it does now), it would not be an issue at all. If they instead hide the option away, a lot of nontechnical--and probably some technical--people will be confused about why the behavior changed.
I think that the ultimate quality of the change depends on exactly how they handle the UX behind.
As for the intent and general idea, I support it entirely. As others have said, I do not hate all ads, just annoying, distracting, loud, obnoxious and sometimes vulgar ads which some websites employ.
>Starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising that is considered not annoying. By doing this you support websites that rely on advertising but choose to do it in a non-intrusive way. And you give these websites an advantage over their competition which encourages other websites to use non-intrusive advertising as well. In the long term the web will become a better place for everybody, not only Adblock Plus users. Without this feature we run the danger that increasing Adblock Plus usage will make small websites unsustainable.
Part of me is extremely disappointed ABP made this change, but part of me knows there's got to be some compromise between absolutely no ads and annoying, intrusive ads. Not every website can offer a pay service. I'm happy they're making this change with small website owners in mind, and I'm also happy they're allowing users to turn off all ads by going in to settings.
Running a website costs money. Some people also want to make profit, but that's beside the point. Micropayment solutions at present are sadly lacking - especially for international audiences. Don't forget also that you and I are a technical audience; I know at first my mother thought that websites got a split of her ISP bill when she viewed their pages. So advertising bridges a lot of these gaps.
Instead it is a serious question about why some advertising must exist and be tolerated.
I don't believe anyone is saying that you must tolerate advertising :-)
There is no answer to why advertising must exist aside from it being the best answer we have to a growing problem of who's going to pay for the Web. I'd rather have a few ads than fork out money on a package-basis a la cable channels.
If the majority of people with internet access preferred to pay directly for every website they use, advertising wouldn't exist. But they don't, so it does.
What about https://flattr.com/ ? It seems to be exactly, what you're looking for but haven't really taken off.
All that being said, I see this ending badly for ABP. It won't be long until someone creates a version that blocks all ads again by default.
This version will still be able to block all ads. By does it matter if it's by default?
Just recently I had this idea that there should be a independent organization or work group which maintains this kind of white list, and websites would gain a badge if their ads are non-intrusive and polite. There would also be an agreed standard which all ads should comply to gain the badge.
This way it would be easy to implement in ad blockers, and it would be clear to website visitors what kind of ads they would see. Being an independent organization, the motivation should be just to make web a better place, not to benefit a few specific companies.
* Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar)
* Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images
* At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request)
All German sites and then... Sedo..
Edit: and it would have helped for me to read further down; someone has already posted this!
Just saying.
Happily, these techniques are far more profitable, better tolerated by users, and not affected by ad blockers at all :-) So block ads all you like - the agile publishers will adjust and the ones relying on garish display ads will go under.. which means more opportunities for the agile ones.
Some tech sites (/.) have ads that show attractive women with large breasts wearing tight t-shirts. The ad is printed on the t-shirt so I'm forced to stare at her boobs to read the ad. That's distracting to me. I can't focus when boobs are popping-up in ads.
So I want all ads disabled. Even pure words with no pictures can be distracting while glancing at a page if it has the right words in it.
On one hand I do want to support sites that I like and I know that for many this occurs through advertising.
On the other hand, I am honestly confused by what the web looks like with ads. Its been so long since the very first thing I did on any new computer, vm, or even non-technically inclined friend's machine wasn't to install ad block.
In many cases this wasn't really to not see the ads, but rather to make things appear where I'm used to seeing them. While I probably wouldn't find the "non-intrusive" ads themselves annoying. What I would find annoying is that the removal of the ads in many cases changes the layout of the page. All of a sudden what used to be the top right "module" maybe with recent posts or something is now the middle right module with an ad above it. Or even worse, some div that i'm used to seeing 'above the fold' now requires scrolling to see. All of a sudden my intuition and learned behavior for the interface has changed.
Basic sanity determines where things should appear on the page. Ads, by definition, try to draw your attention from useful content. If they provided the content you wanted, we wouldn't call them ads.
And these are actually welcome! I click through, check their prices, and sometimes in the course of doing so I find good deals on other related products (business cards, shipping materials, etc.) How else would I know where to find some of these things?
I'm not saying that all ads are good, but that I sometimes benefit from companies advertising to me for services which I am actively looking to purchase. Sometimes, when I don't hit an exact search query, ads are indeed content I want!
Regarding companies who can do small-run circuit board fabrication, I highly recommend Screaming Circuits: http://www.screamingcircuits.com/ . They do both fabrication and assembly. Also check out Sunstone: http://www.sunstone.com/
In no way trying to say my view point is 'correct', completely rational or that I'm the best 'web user' for dealing with it the way I have, but rather simply pointing out a contingent impact on the change from my perspective.
I disagree. This is the cowardly and helpless solution to the problem: When in doubt, throw Yet Another Dialog or installation wizard page in the user's face.
Programs should confidently do Something Sensible by default, and instead let the 25% who want something different be able to easily change it.
Less choices makes more happy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...
If I am installing Ad Block, I quite naturally expect it - surprise! - to block things. It is double more so if I am already running the AdBlock and just going through an upgrade. So for all intents and purposes the Sensible Thing to do is to opt users out by default from this new feature. This however would provide zero traction to the feature as it needs an exposure. Now, do tell me how the hell one would let discerning users know and opt-in without throwing yet another dialog at them?
> Huh? Cowardly? Are you serious?
Yes, if the developer knows at least 75% of the user base needs and wants A, but still gives the choice between A and B, it is just because he is afraid of dealing with the noisy minority afterwards.
> If I am installing Ad Block, I quite naturally expect it - surprise! - to block things.
And it does block things. Whether it blocks all the things, blacklisted things, non-whitelisted things or whatever is another discussion.
> It is double more so if I am already running the AdBlock and just going through an upgrade.
A completely valid concern. The behavior of an existing product should not change during an upgrade.
> So for all intents and purposes the Sensible Thing to do is to opt users out by default from this new feature.
No, that would be an Insensible Thing, because 75% of users want the other thing.
> Now, do tell me how the hell one would let discerning users know and opt-in without throwing yet another dialog at them?
There's nothing to opt-in to, because the partial block isn't a "feature". It's now the core functionality of AdBlock.
The Hell A) The Block Everything feature could be available in happy colors in the first page of the options.
The Hell B) The AdBlock plugin blurb could say "The entire purpose of AdBlock is to block the "bad" ads [feasability of deciding badness is another discussion]. If you want to block all ads, consider installing NameOfTheAdBlockFork instead."
Make a sane ad system, where ads are proxied through the same webserver as the remainder of the page, and I would have no problems with activating them.
This will just impact those people who had it installed for them, and who happen to update. I doubt that will be the saviour of many small sites - if adblock plus was killing them in the first place that is.
This is about money.
EDIT 2:
I did read the article and I know it is an option but making viewing ads of any kind opt in vs opt out is (imho) dubious. When the user installs an extension called ad-BLOCK plus, explicitly to block adds, just block them by default dammit and let any users who want to, opt out selectively.
I also don't want a situation where a user has to opt out with every upgrade and so on. Nutshell, I don't trust the devs anymore,who seem to be selling out the users.
I don't know much about ad networks or javascript so on Hacker News I am asking for alternatives, from those who are experts. Why the downvotes? wtf?
And I think both extensions are open source so somebody could just fork it.
Also I'm a little confused by the talk of "making small websites unsustainable". Do ads really make small websites sustainable, or is the mention of "small websites" just an applause light?
My company runs a few content sites that are primarily monetised through advertising. They're not small as in "some guy updating them in his free time", but they're small as in a few paid members of the editorial team, a few million pages a month. For us, yes, advertising is the difference between us being a profitable company and us not being a company at all.
That said, a.) we are doing OK before this adblock change and b.) our adverts don't fit what are being defined as "acceptable" here. We do make sure we never get too obtrusive, we don't do automatic playing videos, we don't do roadblocks, we don't do anything with sound, we don't do anything that covers content or expands when you mouseover... but some of the banners we serve are flash with basic animations. We, and the majority of our users, are happy that this is a good way to advertise without letting it become an annoyance, but we wouldn't make it onto ABP's whitelist.
I also have a few entries in my /etc/hosts ...
127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ak.p.openx.net
127.0.0.1 tags.expo9.exponential.com
127.0.0.1 resources.infolinks.com
127.0.0.1 resources.intextscript.com
127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com
As for the others, the damned double-underscore spam links were getting to be just too annoying while reading text — especially the ones that would react to mouseovers.
Regardless of if money is changing hands as a result of any agreement, I think this is a great move that will be able to positively affect the web advertising landscape.
This sounds perfect, and it's more in line with a cogent policy of rewarding good ads and punishing bad ones.
I wonder how to get on that list.
! Text-based search ads on suche.netzwelt.de ! Static image ads on t3n.de ! Text ads with small static images on focus.de ! Text ads on Sedo parking domains
In other words, they're not whitelisting Google or any other major web sites, so the vast majority of people won't notice, even with the white list turned on.
The obtrusiveness of the ads they let through will directly affect the number of users they have, so their interests are still aligned with their users. But they are simply more aligned with the 75% who don't blanket oppose all ads.
Notice, however, "display" does not equate to "I'm actually looking at it, reading it, and then clicking on it", my mind's own ad blocker will happily ignore it.
I am not someone who believes in website ads as no one seems to have gotten rich advertising their product with website ads; I am not opposed to putting them on my own website, of course, advertisers are welcome to pay me, I just don't see the point in becoming one.
https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
On a serious note, this is a great move. I will finally install the plugin because I do believe advertising, if done right, keeps the internet free (as in beer).
I think this is a good step in the right direction though I'm not sure entirely if its a great idea to have the developers decide, maybe a wiki-style process?
As someone who never run Adblock for the past two years, I can't see how is this a big deal. IMHO, if what you want is a distraction-free reading, Readability/Reader is the answer. Maybe it's because the kind of sites I often visits, but situation on ads has improved a lot in the past few years.
I've clicked a lot of ads in the past year, some even led me to actually purchase something. Recent ones I can recalled from memory are Parallels Desktop 20ドル off deal (bought second license for my notebook), GraphicRiver's bundle pack (which led me to know the site and bought a ton more stuff from GR) and few books via Amazon affiliate links.
Apart from privacy concern, I can't see why someone always think ads are evil.
That's a rather unfair assumption.
And here there'll actually be extra revenue at stake, so there is more incentive
First of all we don't have to imagine that scenario. Going back to the beginning of the internet there weren't really any ads to speak of. Secondly, using the Internet Wayback Machine we can actually see what that internet looked like back then. And because the Wayback Machine doesn't save most images, you can get an even better feel for what the internet would look like if everyone used an ad blocker.
There are some sites which I feel are worth paying for, and others (particularly news sites), that which I don't yet I'm still willing to wade through the non-obtrusive ads in exchange for keeping it free.
Perhaps you would prefer to pay an Internet fee?
I feel dumb for needing to point this out to you but...I already pay an internet fee. Everyone I know pays a fee to access the internet.
Maybe your Corporate Overlord Internet Dream can't be sustained without ads but I know my internet can. I connected for years to BBS's that were free and maintained by volunteers. To believe that the internet can't function without ads is shortsighted.
And finally, I do think ads are evil because done wrongly - spammed. (Even thus the decision is right, because I also accept that our society works like that and DNT needs to be respected.)
I do not recall ANY ads that brought true value on the Net to my purchasing needs.
They're bad.
Examplification: I browse review for the latest phone. It looks cool. If ads aren't blocked, I get hundred of "buy this phone here and there" "get cables for the phone" yada yada and some random totally unrelated ads.
I don't care for any of those. Why? Because If I wanna buy the phone, accessories, or related stuff I'm not just going to click on the first link and click buy. That's dumb.
I'm going to go to a price checker online, and decide which one has the best price/shipping/quality/rating/etc ratio!
So instead, if the ads would link me to that, and refer the review site if I do buy, I'd be much happier.
Of course I realize this cannot be because, the comparison site would be corrupted eventually, as we're talking big amount of moneys here.
My 2cts as usual. ;-)