When everyone used combinations of AOL, Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo! and Google was just this trendy new shiny thing, one of the main attractions of the new kid on the block was advertising that was unobtrusive and sometimes even helpful. The reason for adblockers was not because 'uuuh advertising' it is because 'uuuh shit advertising'. Your page lit up like a christmas tree on acid, you could hardly see the content for the tidal wave of shit adverts for useless shit. Your shitty dial-up slowed to a crawl as it downloaded animated gifs and dozens of spy cookies. Google won because they weren't greedy bastards who completely took the f'ing piss out of people to the point where the service they were supposed to be providing was degraded to point of being unusable. THIS! This is why we can't have nice things! Because you go too far! Because you just can't help yourselves! And the information finds a way as it always has of routing around the damage. The media will have to add value for anyone to pay them for it and quite a lot of the time people will simply refuse to pay and be happy with the news from other sources who are happy to give it away, and it doesn't take a very cynical person to imagine that those sources may be less stringent or have some ulterior motives for doing so, so yes, happy days and best of luck with the banner ads and paywalls. uuuh.