*Full disclosure - I am a developer at Vox Media, the publisher of The Verge.
1. The advertisers who pay you get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because you live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, you are using us as products more than treating us as your paying customers. Let me restate to be extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to your finance department.
4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2]. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of content that relies on advertising revenue.
Added together, we readers are paying a lot more for "free" Verge content than if we could just straight up pay you for straight-up ad-free articles. And even we non-readers are paying because of the social costs, and all the link-bait that spams the web because of the perverse incentives of advertising.
-
[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]
[1] Do you really need a link for this one? We all know that money decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who wins, and has a tremendous influence on what legislation they introduce, support or fight.
[2] http://www.chaosisgood.com/2013/03/how-advertising-undermine...
If large numbers of people were to start using Javelin, it could certainly affect revenue.
If.