Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

advertisers know how to count money. If those Ads won't be efficient, you wouldn't see them. If you see them, it means they are efficient and lead to actual user engagements.

> it is just plain dumb --- and most consumers are now blocking it.

Consumers are blocking them because companies abused them, this also applied to "contextual" Ads like on youtube and google search, if company put too many of them, users will be blocking them regardless of targeting approach.

> A much more reasonable/sensible alternative --- "context sensitive" advertising. Only show ads when the consumer specifically expresses an interest

Advertisers obviously run those campaigns too. If that interest is very strong and well monetized, advertiser will shift funds to that slice, but that's not always the case, hence we see "personalized" Ads, because they are more efficient in many cases.

Just nitpicking here, but that does not make adblocking and copyright infringement similar. Copyright is not inherently about revenue. It's about who has legal control over the distribution of the work.

Copyright is violated when a work is distributed or reproduced (or performed or... there's a few categories).

If I take a website, duplicate it, then publish it myself, I am engaging in copyright infringement.

If another person comes along and views my website, they are not engaging in an illegal act. It's the act of distribution that is infringing, not the act of receiving.

In your example, if a publisher creates a website and distributes their content, that publisher is exercising their rights to distribute that work. But there's no strings attached, there. Unless I sign some sort of binding contract that stipulates that I must view ads in order to receive the content, there is nothing in copyright law that says I'm in any way stealing or breaking the law by blocking those ads.

And if such a contract was in place (say, a click-through ToS... though whether those are enforceable is a question), my blocking those ads would be a contractual violation but it would not be "theft" in any meaningful sense, nor would it violate copyright law (it would be a violation of that specific contract).

So no, they are not "inherently the same thing". A publisher publishes their content. As a receiver of that content, I can do whatever I wish with it, including censoring/redacting the portions I don't want to view. Similarly, if I bought a newspaper and cut out all the ads before I read it, no reasonable person would consider that "theft".

You are probably making the common mistake of thinking that the larger the population the bigger a sample needs to be to accurately poll. That is true for lower populations but the "sample needed vs. population size" curve is asymptotic.

For example, suppose we want to determine what percent of people believe X, with a 5% margin of error and a 95% confidence level. Here's a table of the random sample size needed for various populations:

  Sample  Population
    80           100
   278         1 000
   370        10 000
   383       100 000
   385     1 000 000
   385    10 000 000
   ...           ...
   385             ∞