I block ads so perhaps one of the many "we owe it to site owners to not block ads" types can explain an alternative solution which doesn't involve me paying for stuff I don't want and which both slows my devices and drains their batteries.
$100/year will cover all Internet ads.
$500/year will cover all advertising. Period.
That's money you're already paying.
Oh, and that's Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, pretty much. The rest of the world gets awesome content for no charge.
My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my maths check out, that's $500/year.
Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser.
I'll see if I cant find an excellent HN comment made a ways back (and not by me).
The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.