The ads aren't there purely to annoy people, they're there to support the content you'd otherwise pay for. The idea of paying them instead of getting ads is also a way to support that content.
There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.
For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.
Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.
Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.
What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.
Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
This is flatly false. CPM models are alive and well. You don't need to look any further than AdSense for proof of that.
Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.
But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.
Certainly.
> and how you use it
Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.
Recall back in the early 80s - the idea was to pay for TV so you wouldnt have ads...