I certainly can't speak for The Public At Large <tm>. In my case, though, I agree with the fundamental argument for advertising -- writers gotta be paid somehow

I certainly can't speak for The Public At Large <tm>. In my case, though, I agree with the fundamental argument for advertising -- writers gotta be paid somehow, and if you're going to read stuff on the web for free, it's either ads or PBS-style pledge drives -- but I've slowly come around to the ad-blocking camp anyway. The problem to my mind isn't web advertising as a concept, it's web advertising as it's frequently implemented. Reading a web page is conceptually more like a magazine than a television, yet web ads increasingly make even the most intrusive television ads seem pleasant by comparison. I suspect that a fundamental part of the problem with web ads stems, paradoxically, from web pages having zero marginal cost. There's effectively an infinite amount of advertising space to sell, which has quickly driven the value of ads toward zero. I don't think advertising as it exists now is going to be a sustainable business model for the web; Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News may do better, because they impose a scarcity on ad space -- which will both make the UX better and make the ads more valuable. But I doubt that's a long-term solution, either.