[coldpie]

> Open ended question, is there a solution?

Well, let's find out. Ads suck all of the air out of the room. If you provide your content through another business model, someone else can just copy your content and slap ads on it and make a few bucks. And because search engines function on those same ads, they're incentivized to send you to the spam sites instead of the real source of the content. If we kill ads as a business model, then we can start to explore other business models and find out what actually works.

> Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads.

No. There are other options. One example is the Patreon model. I pay for several creators who do not gate their content to payment. They make their content available to everyone, for free. I could view their content for free, but I want to encourage them to continue creating, so I pay them for it. Is it a viable option for every situation? I don't know. But the mere existence of ad-based business models means it's very difficult to explore non-ad-based solutions. For this, and a whole host of other reasons, using an ad-blocker is more ethical than not.