I can understand why there wouldn't be a "no ads" box from a business standpoint. Ad-supported sites could say "we currently have no better business model than

I can understand why there wouldn't be a "no ads" box from a business standpoint. Ad-supported sites could say "we currently have no better business model than advertising, but we could make the ads less terrible if you help". Nobody does this because the trust is completely gone. If you claim "we can offer you crappy ads or better ads", nobody really believes you'll do that, and there are some very dubious definitions of "better ads". So people demand the financially impossible, "no ads". There's also a lot more hostility towards internet ads than other media, in part because trust was broken very early on. Bad internet ads are a lot worse than bad traditional-media ads. Other media had effective limits on how obnoxious an ad could be: if you accidentally lingered your eye over the Kroger ad in the newspaper, it didn't expand and crowd out the latest Covid statistics. The injury-lawyer ad on TV couldn't provide a vector for a zero-day that permanently dialed your set to Telemundo. I also suspect there was a lot more "ad curation" in legacy media-- the ad choice still reflected on the publisher, and the cost of entry was high enough to filter out some of the most scammy ads. (Could you pull off the "Punch the monkey and win a PS3" scam if you had to pay for high-quality print ads?) The result: people who never hit the "30 second skip" button on their VCR remote are intimately familiar with uBlock Origin.