The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me. I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint

The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me. I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works. I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.