I don't know what the solution here is.
My job is to keep my systems secure. Other peoples' jobs are their business. Unless I signed a contract or gave them my word, I have no obligation towards them.
> This means there's a shift to native advertising in response, which means they're not just shitting in the water. They're shitting in everything else too, and trying to cover up the taste.
Easy solution: if they shit on everything, I avoid the entire plague-ridden, smelly, nuclear waste dump they created.
(Please understand I'm not saying this to stoke conflict. I'm just sharing how I think through the question of how advertisers survive.)
Brutally honest here: I don't care if the advertisers survive. I do realize that at some level, a consumer has to be made aware of a product in order to purchase that product. The problem IMHO, there is too much advertising overall. I'd prefer more effort went into making quality products, than into manufacturing the need for more unnecessary products. Obviously, this is a pipe dream.
And thieves need to steal to survive.
The internet was great before advertising, and it'll be great after advertising.
"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" - https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...
It is also a matter of preference I'd say (actually preference vs annoyance). I install adblock to everyone mainly for the malware+abusing; I wouldn't go to such lengths otherwise. AFAIK I did it with the default "allow non-intrusive ads" checked.
Car companies don't sue oil companies when high gas prices hurt SUV sales. It's part of the risk of doing business.
How many more sites are you willing to pay at that same level?
Right now, as far as I can tell, advertising supported sites are out-competing sites that directly charge users, meaning that users prefer not to pay. That makes leaves advertising as the most sustainable model.
Simple sites designed to promote the spread of genuinely useful information can be designed to use microscopic resources and operate on little money these will be fine.
Some sites provide neat services people are willing to pay for these will be fine.
Some sites represent the online presence of organizations with significant budgets these will be fine.
Much of what remains isn't worth much and if no viable means of support can be found I guess they shouldn't exist.
Honestly 1/2 of the modern web could go away and not much would be lost.
It's only a crisis if your livelihood depends on making a bunch of crap nobody in their right mind would pay significant resources to support.
Do you believe that's realistic?
What sites are so essential that we couldn't replace them?
https://mondaynote.com/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-inste...
Cuts both ways.
I'm sure that if a large number of companies were able to cut $277 from your average aggregate monthly spending in exchange for a guarantee that you were buying their products, they'd be signing up. Perhaps some sort of subscription service that you couldn't opt out of. You can try doing that as a startup.