[Dan42]

It's an interesting hypothesis.

Unfortunately I see a bunch of people kneejerk to say "adblocking is good" or "ads are bad" when that's not really relevant to the question.

But I don't think it's adblockers that caused the ruin the of the ad-based free content model, rather they are the symptom. I believe the cause is Google capturing an ever-higher share of the ad revenue. Let's say in the old days 80% of the ad revenue went to the publisher (and 20% to the ad ecosystem), and that was enough to keep the lights on. Ad revenue dried up, but it's because the share that goes to the publisher is now 20% while the "ecosystem" (mostly Google now) captures 80%. This happened gradually like a frog boiling in water, and as ads generated less revenue per unit, publishers were forced to add more ads per page to compensate. Just one more ad. And one more. And 15 years later there's more ads than content. In response, users started using adblockers more and more, which led to decreasing revenue, which led to more ads per page. A vicious cycle.

Nowadays there's so little revenue to made made from ads (since most is captured by Google) that only content with the smallest production cost can make it. Genuine content is not economical, and the only content that can survive on those razor-thin margins is automatically-generated SEO spam.