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Comment by lisivka | Hacker News Reader

So use an adblocker to give them lesson.

Yep, that's what I tend to do. Particularly on my mobile device, where I've settled into a scorched earth policy on ads.

Sucks, though. I like having access to high-quality content, and I believe journalists deserve to get paid for their work. Unfortunately, the Internet at large has long since decided that just paying people for their product over the table is not what the norm should be.

It doesn't have to be that way, flattr & the like do provide a viable path to monetary gain for the news industry outside of advertisers. What this means is just like you may have paid for a paper in the past, you should set a budget for flattr and add who you want to support so they are compensated and disincentivized from advertising to you.

Alternatively, if a site does non-aggressive advertising like Dslreports.com, that is quite tolerable. More niche sites are now doing delayed access paywalls too.

Try using a script/media blocker, such as uMatrix, rather than an Ad-Blocker.

The disadvantage will be that sites which require scripts will break on first-access.

The advantages are better overall privacy + security, and that simple static ads won't be blocked and hence those authors will be compensated.

(Edited to better match parent's concerns)

Or direct action. The gray hats among us might rent or subvert a botnet and use it to click those ads like crazy. Click, click, click. Generate overtly fraudulent clicks by the billions, all day and all night.

That's the only way to shut them down for good -- make it hurt to abuse your visitors.

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