This constant attention grabbing destroys whatever narrative is being crafted.
I wonder if it’s confusing their ad network.
Breastfeeding. So nice.
Now give that baby a chihuahua's head. Grotesque. And those teeth are sharp. But still, it's your baby. So you go with it.
Now give the baby spider claws. Then 20 eyeballs.
At what point do you reject your child?
You're right that using an ad blocker isn't worse than closing the tab when it comes to revenue that comes from actually clicking on the ads. And I can only assume that's how it works, I don't know.
What I was trying to say is that authors intend to share their content with ads. It's like having the ads there is what they're charging me for their otherwise free content. Not that I click on the ads. Not that I even read the ads. Just to have the ads there.
Half the time, it doesn't bother me too much, and I consume their content to their terms.
However, many sites are unreadable with so many ads. So, using an ad blocker would help me consume their content, yes. And since it's very rare for me to actually click on an ad, it wouldn't make much economic difference to them anyway.
The central point of my comment wasn't about this, though. It was that most of the internet isn't worth reading. So when I'm faced with content I'm not willing to "pay" for by having all the ads on my screen, it's okay to just let them go. It doesn't really matter. They won't be missed.
So I prefer to see the ads from those I keep reading, just because it's what they've implicitly asked to do by sharing their content.
Then again, this is not an advice. I'm not defending a point. That's just what I've been doing.