The notion that I should feel obligated to let someone try to persuade me of something is absurd. Advertisers, the people who bought the ad, are paying for imp

The notion that I should feel obligated to let someone try to persuade me of something is absurd. Advertisers, the people who bought the ad, are paying for impressions in the hope of converting them into revenue. An impression spent on me has absolutely zero chance of ever generating any revenue or any other kind of value. This is a safe assumption that has held true in my decade or so of browsing the web. The impressions that I block are spent on someone else, where they have at least the potential to lead to conversions. Thus, I am helping the advertiser make more money. The ones who lose out in this situation are the middle men: the agencies, networks and content providers. Though their impressions become more valuable, they have less of them to sell and this apparently works out to a loss. However, appealing to my sympathy about this is nonsensical. They are simply asking me to help them sell worthless impressions to some third party. I would never feel inclined to do that, no matter how indebted I felt to the content provider. Ad supported sites who complain about blocking fail to see the big picture. Their entitled thinking goes no further than "when you do this, I get money, so you should/must do this". If internet advertising is not sustainable in the face of ad blocking, then it is not sustainable at all. Incidentally, asking me to actively avoid sites who's ads I don't plan to view is also absurd. The web simply does not, never has, and never could work that way. Nobody can be expected to add that layer of deliberation to the act of clicking on a link. By publishing an unsecured website, you are implicitly authorizing anybody to link to it and to view it in any modified form.