Major parts of the web can and have worked just fine without advertising. The forums and hobby websites I spend most of my time on don't advertise, and easily

Major parts of the web can and have worked just fine without advertising. The forums and hobby websites I spend most of my time on don't advertise, and easily survive on voluntary donations. We even have built in hosting for user uploaded pictures and videos, so we're not relying on any external services at all. I've met a lot of close friends through these sites, and have done a lot of collaboration. And even more goofing off ;) For the non-WWW real time stuff, I also use a lot of IRC, which has always managed to be free for the end user and ad-free. And more recently Discord does the same thing without ads (I pay for Nitro, but regular users don't have to). I also use Reddit and Facebook a lot, not because I think those sites offer anything particularly valuable to me, but because of network effects. I don't think these offer anything particularly compelling that couldn't be offered by non-ad supported services. The "big one" in my mind is video sites such as Youtube, I don't know how they could survive if a very high percentage of their users were blocking their ads. I pay for their premium ad-free service, but am among a small minority willing or able to do that. Can their business model work purely on premium subscriptions that offer extra perks? It seems like it only barely balances out right now, and I don't think the cost of hosting all these videos will become dirt cheap anytime soon.