Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expe

Why would I pay someone to stop sending me malware? I'm not going to pay random sites to not send crypto miners or not auto download and execute a virus. I expect my computer to protect me from those things. For more general pay-to-browse, it needs to have the friction of the user deciding to pay, or you still incentivize spam (maybe even worse than with ads). As long as you keep that friction, you don't really change much because most sites on the Internet aren't worth anything, especially the commercially motivated ones. The ones that are worth something already charge money (and people pay because it's valuable) or they're not trying to monetize (academia, free culture groups, hobby discussion groups, etc). "How do we get people to pay fractions of a cent" is the wrong problem to solve. The correct related problem is "how do we filter out all the cruft that isn't even worth 1 cent?" Blocking ads removes the financial incentive for spam, and is therefore a socially positive action in addition to being prudent security posture. Assuming ads have an effect on your psychology (and we ought to believe they do), it also helps you to remain a more moral person by preventing you from receiving and internalizing constant messages to consume frivolously. With climate change being one of the most important issues of our time, cutting out such consumption is imperative.