There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
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TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
That's not a serious discussion. There are tons of websites out there, especially those with professional content, that you pay for. For trade magazines, one trick is to get your employer to pay.
LWN has presented the most quality content on Linux and related tech for about ten years now, and they do it professionally.
There are also lots of communities with entrance fees, like Metafilter. And even open access journals have business models of their own.
You can't survive on fees with a flood of mediocre content, but that doesn't invalidate the model for everything else.
There is absolutely a place for paid content on the internet. But I don't think paying for content is a replacement for the majority of things currently funded by ads. The internet is inherently open. Paid content is inherently exclusionary. If we're talking about a genuine substitute for ads, that right there is a non-starter. Whether I'm paying for it out of pocket or through my company, the fact is that there are loads of people out there who are not getting access to that content.
A lot of what sucks about paywalls is the friction, and the trust needed of the host (that the content will be worthwhile). But even in a world that's solved these problems, there's still the fundamental problem that the majority of the world won't have access that content because they don't have the money to throw around.
As is often the case on the modern Internet, the majority of things currently funded by ads is spam.
Then there's all the low-quality content, which isn't outright spam, but no-one in their right mind would pay for. Most people would probably not mourn that either.
The problem with news, if that's what we're discussing, is that they can't decide which side of the fence they want to fall on. Celebrity gossip and researched content is vastly different and there is no reason to believe they fall under the same business model.
If we can get some kind of legislation that requires native advertising to be labelled in a non-obnoxious, but non-discreet way, I'd be totally cool with it, and prefer it to traditional advertising even. Too bad that probably won't happen.
I think Buzzfeed actually does a reasonable job of it, it's pretty easy to see whether or not content is an ad, and who paid for it.
It's not like advertising-supported content was ever uninfluenced by its advertisers.
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
.
TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts