Yes, this is a different political position. I don't want all advertising-supported websites to die, which is what would happen if you convinced everyone to do what you do.
Some have already transitioned to crowdfunding (see patreon, the dice tower getting funded on kickstarter,...) micropayment, subscriptions.
But this case of "your failed business model is not my problem" is not to blame on adblockers alone but also on dwindling ads revenue among others reasons due to facebook driving prices down. When facebook investor story time will come to an end the whole web advertising ecosystem might crumble on itself.
The day the usual website will receive 12 to 20Billions views a month and occupy 10TB of disk space, then we could use wikipedia as a representative example. Until then wikipedia should not be used as an example of how well the usual ad-supported website would fare with an alternative revenue model.
IINM wikipedia has chosen a business model not based on ads which successfully funds the project for about 10+ years.
Yes, that was my point — Wikipedia is probably the absolute best-case scenario for a free website that isn't supported by ads, and they're still panhandling. The usual ad-supported website would fare much, much worse, and would probably just stop providing its service to the world.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fun...
If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.
If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.
People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.
> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years
... wait are you trolling?
Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?
Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.
[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.
I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.
They might have the money but why should they give it away? They are not a charity.
> it would make room for better search engines to emerge
How would those search engines fund themselves? what would their business model be?
But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.