Why Ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love

Well OK, "but"...

Let's not pretend that the web site is the only party that can be hit financially here. Downloading megabytes of unexpected extra crap costs visitors money too (sometimes exorbitant fees if they don't realize they're on cell vs. wifi, or they trigger data-cap overages, or they're out of the country; not to mention consuming extra battery power for unwanted videos).

And of course ads ARE ANNOYING. They have terrible algorithms for avoiding repetition so you see the same exact thing 14 times a day. They are obnoxious as hell. They tend to do EVERYTHING wrong in terms of being user-hostile (e.g. hijacking interfaces or trying to trick you into clicking) and generating noise pollution and animations. They auto-open other pages and app stores, and sometimes auto-open them again after you close the first one, until you have to give up and kill the original tab entirely. Oh, and endless tracking. Given these things, why are advertisers and site owners remotely surprised that people are taking steps to avoid all this crap?

I'm not saying that it's been easy to solve the problem of paying web site owners but advertising in its current form is clearly not the solution. At the very least every page should have a "Here's how to donate:" link at the top to minimize the amount of revenue that seems necessary from other sources.

..and the unscrupulous actions of advertisers have been devastating to the web I love.

I think we will need to find another way to support sites.

Allowing a random 3rd party to run untrusted scripts on my system is not the answer.