[sergiosgc]

Successful ad blocking would kill the advertisement revenue stream. This revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills content.

I like content, and I don't mind paying for it. I'd prefer to pay with money, not via ads. Give me that option.

Further, I don't want a subscription. I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.

[C4stor]

Ads pay a lot more than that on quality websites such as the Scroll ones. 50c per thousand page is so low I can't see how you find it fair. We're talking lets say 1000h of work, and your fair price is 50c ?

[stevenwliao]

If they read 3 articles a day, they've decided that quality journalism across multiple publishers should cost 50 cents a year.

[dwild]

> I want to pay as I go, at the rates ads pay. 50¢ per thousand pages sounds ok to me.

You often get a ecpm of 50 cents? That seems quite awful, even more so from the US. It should be closer to 10x that.

[Scoundreller]

In my experience, US$5/CPM is about right for general content focused on an industrialized market, but:

1) it’s based on page views where ads are rendered. So ad-blocked users aren’t in the denominator.

2) most of that revenue is driven by clicks, not ad views. So users like me, that rarely click on ads, ever, probably earn publishers about 50cents/cpm.

[dwild]

Sure but that price that you suggest is for everyone, not only ad-block users or people that doesn't click on ads.

At the end of the day, if it cost them more than an ecpm of 0.50$ to produce that content (and I'm pretty sure it does, because most ad-based website never made ton of profit and that was the case even before adblocking became popular), than that just doesn't make sense either to have a price that low.

[alkonaut]

I'm happy to pay by seeing ads or by paying money. I'm not happy to have my personal info floating around on the servers of the ad-industry in order to deliver targeted ads.

Subscriptions risk making silos. Once you have paid $5 for site-group-A (one million sites) it's annoying to find that the site you are reading belongs to site-group-B which belongs to some other subscription. This is the HBO-vs-Netflix problem.

[Touche]

Keep in mind that Firefox is a "user agent", their job is not to make websites happy, it's to make their users happy.

Ad-blocking is a lot like using a DVR, or a VCR. Someone sends you data and you have the right to not view all of that data. The company has the right not to send you the data if you don't pay for it, but they don't have the right to tell you that you must view all of it.

[faissaloo]

>This revenue stream is what pays for the content you enjoy, so ad blocking kills content.

Content that is funded by ads is often not content I particularly care about. If it matters enough people will be willing to fund it, if not, let it die.

[dwild]

Seriously? You never use StackOverflow? You never enjoyed anything on Youtube?

You are definitely in a tiny minority if that's actually the case.

[faissaloo]

I don't mind ads on SO so much since they're not trying to get you to buy stuff. I might enjoy YouTube but it's definitely overrated as a platform.

[abainbridge]

I agree, but the problem here is that not all pages are of equal value. The Guardian ought to be able to charge me more per page if it was written by one of their full time employees. I can't see how Mozilla will ever be able to figure out how to apportion the money, without just exposing my "balance" and the cost of visiting each page.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

People once said the same thing about pop-up blockers.