And it actually is the equivalent of saving that money! If you want quality journalism, or even just an ops budget for the hosting site for your cat pictures, someone needs to pay at some point. There's a very close analogy to print publications: if magazines and newspapers didn't have ads, the newsstand price would be significantly higher due to the loss of impressions. Now, imagine if your Sunday newspaper had a magical printing press that could print, on-demand, a customized version for you without ads. If everyone switched to that option, they'd lose all their ad revenue, so they'd need to raise the newsstand price accordingly!

Which is interesting because of how many people mention that adds really only contribute a small fraction of that. From what I can find $1 per 1000 impressions seems to be about average for ad revenue.

That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites.

I'd also be interested in a focused ad session to reduce the cost of my browsing. I.E. you show me products and I actually click on them to check them out, and you add money to my pool for browsing. It would have to be an opt-in scenario, but that would be an alternative to paying and seeing ads while you browse.

Ad blockers are NOT harming anyone. I don't want ads. Content providers need to decide whether they want to provide content for free or charge. If I like their content enough to pay, I might pay. If they provide free content with ads, I'll block them.