Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
Those sites should consider sending surreptitious crypto miners instead, which would be more ethical. Then they'd only be using energy instead of using energy and bandwidth and also spying on and manipulating people.
Users should of course block all malware.
The other obvious thing to consider is that if you're going to write an article to convince people of your opinion, I'm not going to pay you for that. You're the one trying to influence me!
I hate intrusive ads as much as the next guy, but denying that ads have benefits and people overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Saying people overwhelmingly choose ads is conceptualizing things wrong. Take this blog: it just copied a BI snippet about a study some other party did. No one even linked to the original study.
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
I would love to have a way to pay for most websites but experience shows that the genius MBAs get your subscription fee and then start tacking on ads and tracking anyway. So fuck them. ad blockers, proxies, pihole, vpns, whatever you have to do.
Google gave people that but ~nobody used it (it was called Google Contributor). Many similar stories over the years. People overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even when "MBAs" don't add extra ads on top or whatever other objection you have, it's all been tried before and failed every time.
Revealed preferences are not reliable in situations where individuals make choices based on factors other than their true preferences, such as... limited information, social pressure, financial pressure (!!), impulsive behavior, addiction, lack of technical knowledge to pursue alternatives (!!), or when their preferences change significantly over time or moment to moment.
Recourse to "people have revealed their preferences" is the last refuge of the defenders of the status quo of deeply corrupted "markets".
Sure, and the vast majority choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even many of the ones who claim to want to pay don't actually put their money where their mouth is when given the chance.
