[matt4077]

It's the article's raison d'être to advocate NOT blocking all ads, but to be discriminating so as to encourage better practices by the publishers/advertisers/ad networks.

As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically.

It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.

[xatan_dank]

I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them".

How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.

Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.