[creshal]

> Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless.

The problem is it's not just some. At first, there was bounds of worthless advertising. Classical random banner ads have about zero revenue, and have had for over a decade. Instead of good advertisements, we got pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing animated gif ads, autoplay video ads, autoplay audio ads, ads that pretended to be native OS dialogs, link ads, … just to grab the users' attention anyway, and trick a few into buying absolute crap they didn't want. Ad networks getting used as vectors to infect computers (cf. latest Firefox/pdfjs exploit) are just the final nail in the coffin.

Print magazine ads work well because they don't try to infect me with viruses, don't try to trick me, don't make my fan run at 100%, don't drain my monthly data plan in a day (or battery in an hour), and don't keep me from reading the rest of the magazine. Had web advertisement stayed that same, I doubt we would ever have seen adblockers gain a substantial marketshare – nobody would use them if installing them was more of a hassle than just ignoring adverts.