But its the content creators being punished, not the ad companies. If anything ad blockers are in their interest since the type of person who blocks ads is probably the type of person to ignore them anyway.
It's both, right?
I think you could make the argument that you affect the content creator to a higher degree (larger percent of income) but I suspect you affect the ad company to a higher dollar amount. Nonetheless it's a negative for both.
With that in mind, there is a net-positive outcome for the ad-company if users who aren't going to click on the ads use ad-block, because that means they don't have to pay the content creator for showing ads that nobody clicked on. They only miss possible profit if you're using ad-block but would have clicked on an ad were it presented to you, which is unlikely considering ad-block is generally opt-in. Depending on the ratio of how much they make per-click vs. how much they pay the content-creator per ad, they could definitely come-out with more money due to users using ad-block and not requiring them to pay the content creator when they wouldn't have clicked on the ad anyway.
Everyone always says they only have ad block on for obnoxious sites, but that's such a load of shit. The free internet is run by ads, like it or not, and as someone who uses ad block I accept that I actively hinder it.
I don't mind if people use ad block, it's just the moral high ground people take that annoys me.
For me, at least, it's a tragedy of the commons out there. All it takes is one bad actor to spoil it all.
People won't pay for bad/terrible content, that is the hard truth.
Not necessarily. There is a threshold of value that must be met to make people pay directly for it. For example I run a niche site that gets 5K uniques each month - clearly I'm providing some value - but I doubt that what I provide is enough to make people pay me directly. Ads are the most effective way of solve that problem: reward content producers that can't meet that threshold but still add some value.