I have a hard time sympathizing at all with "publishers" who are hurt by ad-blockers. The vast majority of web sites, I would guess, fall into one of two categ

I have a hard time sympathizing at all with "publishers" who are hurt by ad-blockers. The vast majority of web sites, I would guess, fall into one of two categories. The first category are sites which are a labor of love: they are written and maintained because someone just wants to have a voice, or to get their information out there. These sites can often be run on nearly-free hardware from a home Internet connection that you would be paying for anyway. Hardware and bandwidth costs are near zero, or low enough that the operator is willing to cover them at a loss. The operator is not expecting to make money, so advertising is not necessary. The second category are sites operated by businesses that are expecting to make money by selling a genuine product or service. These sites have non-trivial costs to develop, operate, and maintain, but the sites lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of the balance sheet. That's OK, because the business sells something else which (presumably) covers that cost and then some. The "publishers" expecting to make money from advertising fall into neither of these categories. They are operating sites with the expectation of making money, but they have nothing generating revenue except advertising placed in their "content". Hoping to make money by running a web site that does nothing but serve pages for free is an unsustainable business model. If you want to make money, sell something less ephemeral than a web page. I'm not saying that publishing (without the scare quotes) is an unsustainable business. If your product is your "content", put it in a form that someone will actually want to buy, like a book or a magazine. Something that your customers can hang on to, that they can reference when they're away from their browsers, that they can lend to their friends, that doesn't simply disappear at your whim. People do pay for those things, and they even tolerate ads there. If you're not willing to provide something of real and tangible value, don't expect your audience to be willing to provide you with a revenue stream. And don't complain when they evade your attempts to force that on them.