Of course it's a valid choice to go along with turning off ad blockers, that's always up to the individual. It might well be better, and less hazardous, to pay

Of course it's a valid choice to go along with turning off ad blockers, that's always up to the individual. It might well be better, and less hazardous, to pay for content than be subject to ads. This issue comes up re: science journals and whether it's appropriate to keep articles behind steep paywalls. The trend increasingly favors "open access" rather than having such important content restricted and inaccessible to the community at large. It's a different thing when talking about buying material items online, in that case it's clear what one is getting for the money. By comparison is the content of most websites really worth paying for? Mostly I'd say the answer is "no", and that's the reason I would rarely choose to pay for content. Ads are a way sites try to extract payments from sellers or third parties, but ultimately it's paid by site visitors one way or another. Since I choose not to pay directly because the marginal entertainment value isn't worth it to me, why would I go along with paying indirectly? I think it's perfectly legitimate to use an ad blocker. No one is obligated to put up with ads just because sites want to make money. If sites refuse to serve content because of ad blocking, the visitor's loss is negligible vs. sites taking substantial risk of losing viewers and jeopardizing site viability altogether. Sites have choices too. They can "clean up their act", police the ads they run, demand the ad servers/agencies eliminate ad-malware and intrusive tracking, etc. Choosing to monetize subscriptions, well, good luck with that, competition is ferocious, and subscribers probably sparse. Perhaps the internet was not really built to be "monetized" by the kind of ads we're talking about. Edit: grammar