I wish, instead of fighting Ad Blockers, they would try as hard to fix they way they run ads. Not to mention the sites, which only exist to display ads and practically don't have their own content except for clickbait headlines.
A side comment: while blocking ads might reduce revenue for sites, it also means the advertiser has to pay for views by people who wouldn't click on the ads anyway.
The thing is that ad blockers don't often don't discriminate between acceptable ads and unacceptable ads and just block everything. Even if you put a lot of effort to make your ads better most people will just block them regardless.
Ad blockers generally _don't_ block acceptable ads. Acceptable ads, by my definition, are ads which are hosted by the website owner and doesn't include spyware; even a small banner ad from a third party ad platform is not acceptable, because regardless the size of the third party ad, it's part of the ad company's surveillance program.
Ads which take the form of an <img> tag pointing to an image hosted on the same domain, aren't blocked (at least in my experience).
Yes, that is the collateral damage inflicted by participating at the current ad model far to long. However, for sites who really want to change, this isn't a real problem. First of all, if you don't serve ads via "ad networks" but as part of your hostet content, I don't think the ads are getting blocked by default. Also, if a site with true content and regular readers has a proper ad model, they can just ask their readers to whitelist their site. If you don't just ask because you don't want to get your ads blocked, but at the same time can tell your readers why this won't be a problem for them, I think many would whitelist the site - if whitelisting is needed at all.
Yeah, any site that pops-up "pls whitelist us!!" gets an instant X on the tab from me. It sucks, but I will never tolerate ads of any kind, no matter how good or bad. To me, they are done, along with tracking on the web (including mobile).
Oh, and before you scream at me, what about people that simply disable JS, which is basically how all of this works anyway.
I'm not entitled to a free web, I get that, but ads are a failing revenue model due to years of sustained abuse, and that damage is not going to be reversed ant time soon.
I would accept ads as the price of a web without paywalls, if they behaved like printed ads: being static, without user tracking, just selected by the relevance of the content they are placed in. Then ads might not only bring revenue to the publication but might be genuinely interesting to me.
This is not a complete truth. Yes, many of them are scam, especially the big, fat, ugly things the adblocks are invented to block.
However, the need for a list of contractors for works is also required, but things like yellow pages is sort of dead, and if you offer services - eg. you're a freelance photographer, designer, etc. - you need to make yourself visible somehow.
A side comment: while blocking ads might reduce revenue for sites, it also means the advertiser has to pay for views by people who wouldn't click on the ads anyway.