There was a time that might have worked. It would have worked with me, anyway. A time when others were using ad blockers, but I had an attitude of "meh, they gotta pay the bills". I might pay a little money to turn off the ads, and were I to use an ad blocker I might whitelist a site or two.

But a threshold was crossed. I can't tell you what that threshold looks like, or name any particular event that set me off. Maybe it's the malware, maybe it's the jiggling belly fat ads, auto-play videos, I dunno. But at some point I said "enough", and I quit giving a shit about anything to do with that industry. The well has been so poisoned that I don't care about finding an antidote anymore. In general, I don't care if websites go under. The poisoned well metaphor breaks down in that I can't do without water, but I can sure as hell do without most of the ad-laden websites out there. I'll miss them, but not enough to be bothered to expend even the minimal effort to whitelist as site.

I don't want to be that person. I want to be empathetic to at least the small content producers just trying to scrape a few bucks. But I've been worn down, and not in the way the advertising industry wished I had been worn down. No, I'm worn down such that it's just easier to run an ad blocker and quit caring. And it's unfortunate that companies like yours get caught in all of it.

Until advertisers understand and embrace this, the people that use adblockers will never relent. There is one, let me repeat, one website that I disable adblocking on: reddit.com. I've never been abused by them, and I don't regret that choice. Every other time I've temporarily relented, I immediately regretted it and blocked them again.

I blocked ads on mobile devices when they started buzzing my phone, sending me the the play store, giving me popups, etc.

now I block everything on all my devices using pi-hole

The site gets a chance to impress me with its "engaging marketing experiences" but when I want to read a longer piece I switch to Reader View and all the CPU hogging madness stops.

Obviously, that doesn't protect me against malware, but I have never suffered a successful malware attack so far in spite of using the web basically 16 hours a day.

I also sometimes get email spam ads from a forum I use. But the advertisers buy access to the mailout directly from the forum owners and the forum owners personally screen them to make sure they're relevant to their audience.

There are cases that still exist which sound like your former experience. They're not horrible, just inconvenient.

That sentence shows a worrying level of entitlement. If you feel your website represents a simple content-for-ads purchase, and you feel that people are stealing from you, if the ad revenue is something you /deserve/, and you feel that 100% of visitors should see ads 100% of the time, then block everyone running an ad blocker from seeing anything[e1]. That's easy to do.

If you're not willing to lock "non payers" out, then you're offering a free service with a donation policy, and complaining that not enough people donate. Well I'm sorry, but they aren't required to. If you don't wanna be a donation based company, then don't be.

I grant you that looking at the before and after on your balance sheet may hurt, but that's not "losing 30% of your ad revenue" because that revenue is not owed to you, due to the nature of the business model that you chose. What it really represents is a potential 30% growth area, made up of people who's requirements have recently changed, and who now need a different strategy to capture. I don't know what to tell you man, markets change all the time. This is business.

[e1] or, as someone else pointed out, just leave the website broken for the "freeloaders" and don't worry about it

When I go to a website, I don't want 6 separate companies doing their best to identify me, tracking my activity, and doing their best to predict what I might actually spend money on so they can get a piece of it.

When I build a website - if I put ads up, I'm handing data about my work product off to people I don't know for what use I have no idea. Is someone going to use that data to build a competitive product? Is someone going to abuse the goodwill I build to my end users? Is the ad platform safe or am I putting my end users at risk? These shouldn't be questions. These should be answered by default by every company that would want to spend money advertising to my end users.

The ads are ineffective, the revenue is terrible unless you are a very popular site, and the questions about the data we are exposing are plentiful.

And yet everyone with a blog about Wednesday night prime time TV is clamoring to put ads up in hopes that it might generate them $100 over the course of a year.

We can do better.

The solution isn't stopping ad-blockers or getting around ad-blockers. The solution is to come up with better ways to generate the same revenue.

Google innovated and now look at them. Where would they be without AdWords? Why isn't anyone else truly innovating? Why do all of the ad tech companies look like clones of one another?

This is most obvious in music. Pre-recording, a career as a musician was a viable but humble one. Your art had a range of perhaps 250km max, and you'd entertain at pubs, gigs and events in that area. You didn't make a lot of money.

Recording replaced a lot of that. Instead of hiring live musicians for their weddings, people chose recordings known to be good. Pubs installed juke boxes with more choice than one musician could ever hope to offer.

However, the carrying capacity of the recording industry was finite. There were only so many recording studios, and they were really expensive to set up and use. On top of that, the pressing factories could only replicate so many albums, even running full tilt. I'm sure if the recording industry could have let everyone record an album, they would have, but they couldn't. They had to pick who got albums and who didn't.

The result was whole nations worth of wealth being centralized into the few hundred people that a given recording industry chose, and all other musicians being left out in the cold. To this day, most municipal orchestra performers have side jobs (often as music teachers but sometimes random other stuff) because if the orchestra does pay a stipend, it's rarely a living wage. Orchestras aren't profitable any more.

But now the recording equipment for a small group goes for the range of ~$10,000, within the savings capacity of a 4 man band, and the internet will let you record and publish for free. The centralization is breaking down, and that's great for the humble garage band that wants to try to make their hobby their job. They might be able to, if they spend some time marketing themselves, and are willing to accept their income will probably be below average. They don't need the recording industry to do it.

However, it's the stuff of nightmares for super-star performers, because as money re-normalizes back to small time musicians across the globe, it'll inevitably drain out from under them.

I agree it's a huge feature for me, and I wish someone would let me pay for it.

Because simply (simplistically?) speaking, a lot of people out there want to make a lot of money, but do not have enough smarts to "truly innovate". So they end up "hustling" - cloning whatever is working, Facebook for X, Groupon for Y, Uber for Z... and there is a reasonable chance that such a strategy pays off with decent enough success rate, so I don't see this trend stopping anytime soon.

Note here that I'm not against certain kinds of advertising, and I'm all for subscription models and donation incentives and a great many other ways to fund sites. But third party advertising networks have forever lost my trust, and I simply won't tolerate the security risk nor the annoyance any longer. Your site is welcome to require me to disable AdBlock, and that's fine. I don't need to read your posts that badly anyway.

Have you thought about handling the advertising yourself and hand picking products and services that are directly applicable to your users and displaying them in an unobtrusive manner?

And as a side note: I consider ads from any ad network to be a security risk and while I respect sites for "politely" asking me to whitelist them I feel it's a misguided approach.

The other reason is it's a community, and the more people we have on the site, the better it is for the site as a whole; more people communicating and interacting with each other, which ideally brings more people and keeps the ones that currently visit.

If not, why would you expect people to stop blocking it?

I feel for sites that show messages like this in an unintrusive yet prominent manner. But I don't remove the ad blocker because I look at what's getting blocked and notice many trackers. If it were only simple ads (preferably plain text), I wouldn't mind and would turn off the ad blocker. But I don't want to be tracked and won't add an exception for any site, cruel though it may seem from the publishers' point of view. For me, what's really cruel is the assumption on the publishers' part that tracking visitors is acceptable and even something visitors shouldn't mind just to keep the site going.