There was a time that might have worked. It would have worked with me, anyway. A time when others were using ad blockers, but I had an attitude of "meh, they gotta pay the bills". I might pay a little money to turn off the ads, and were I to use an ad blocker I might whitelist a site or two.

But a threshold was crossed. I can't tell you what that threshold looks like, or name any particular event that set me off. Maybe it's the malware, maybe it's the jiggling belly fat ads, auto-play videos, I dunno. But at some point I said "enough", and I quit giving a shit about anything to do with that industry. The well has been so poisoned that I don't care about finding an antidote anymore. In general, I don't care if websites go under. The poisoned well metaphor breaks down in that I can't do without water, but I can sure as hell do without most of the ad-laden websites out there. I'll miss them, but not enough to be bothered to expend even the minimal effort to whitelist as site.

I don't want to be that person. I want to be empathetic to at least the small content producers just trying to scrape a few bucks. But I've been worn down, and not in the way the advertising industry wished I had been worn down. No, I'm worn down such that it's just easier to run an ad blocker and quit caring. And it's unfortunate that companies like yours get caught in all of it.