[manigandham]

I think the users always had the same choice, don't visit sites where you don't like the experience. Sure adblockers are finally pushing for better sites and ads but the blunt force approach of just blocking all ad scripts is actually causing more harm then good.

Nowadays, hosting is so cheap that independent blogging is not really at risk, everyone can publish anything anytime. The risk is really with top and mid-tier publishers who produce content for money. These guys will be squeezed and what we're headed towards is both paywalls everywhere and a walled-garden approach where Facebook or other big central apps/sites will control access to everything else. Not sure either is a great option for the future.

Note: Yes micropayments/universal "internet" subscriptions might work but this is a far greater problem than people make it out to be. Any company attempting to do this will need massive scale, perfect tracking (again privacy issues here), secure access to billing and identity and ease of use for users. They will possibly help from either ISPs or some other infrastructure layer to actually make this work and even Google is having trouble with their 2nd try at a micropayments model in their new Contributor program. It's just not an easy thing to solve, definitely not as easy as just putting up a few ads and making the content free.

[darkmighty]

I'm getting dismissed too, and people won't even admit it's a problem, much less give a coherent rebuttal: how are we not headed towards a classic 'Tragedy of the commons' type of scenario where no one wants to compromise (watch ads) but everyone wants free content. I can only conclude quality will degrade and we will get either behind paywalls or crappy content. Serious journalism is clearly suffering imo, for example. In this scenarios privacy degrades, since behind the paywall the provider knows your full identity along with all your browsing habits.

We need solutions for this, not a dismissal. No large company is engaging this in the public because there will be obvious backlash from adblocker users: they are currently fine, getting free content and seeing no ads -- why would they want change? While they don't see the trend is probably unsustainable, in the sense that services will generally be worse than they could have been.

My opinion is that some unobtrusive ads is a price that is worthy of payment, but this scenario is running out if we don't change some rules of come up with solutions. I'm very open to alternatives also such as some kind of internet-wide subscription model. It needs to be discussed, not tossed aside, imo.

[manigandham]

Agreed. There are really 3 things they argue for: performance, privacy and security.

Performance is a given, loading less = faster. Same with security, its just a few bad actors who keep allowing 3rd party content and malware. Many networks dont allow for anything other than text + images which have no malware possibilities.

Those two issues are starting to be solved by this consumer backlash and its a good thing. However when it comes to privacy I never understand how people think paying for things with their credit card is somehow more private (especially with all these data breaches) than some random ad network tracking script. The 3rd party cookie was actually a great thing that could easily be deleted and also stored any opt-out settings for users who wanted to skip tracking. Now with random out-of-context "privacy" reasons, browsers have ruined the effectiveness of cookies which means most networks cant even store a proper opt-out preference and they're also resorting to fingerprinting and other signals (at the ISP level) to track users no matter what device/platform/browser.

What the industry needed was more regulation and better standards, not this brute force guerilla warfare which is really harming the entire industry and leading to an eventually smaller and "closed" web.