The people who "accept ads as a part of life" are funding the content you read and watch. You are not in any way "a bad person", but you should be thankful that not everyone blocks ads.
Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.
Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.
> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.
Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.
If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.
Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.
Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.
For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO.
Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause.
Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time.
Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it.
I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.