A friend was just installing Ad Block Plus on a new machine and sent the following screenshot to me:
There’s something I find highly ironic about the maker of software that limits publishers’ ability to make money asking for donations to continue doing so.
There are a lot of sites out there that use horrible pop-up ads or ads that autoplay with sound, I’m not denying that. There are also a lot of sites that use simple, unobtrusive ads, providing a revenue stream for the site that – in the worst-case scenario – provides no use to the user but also does not do any harm. The latter allows for a bit of a symbiotic relationship between the user and the publisher; the publisher provides content that the user wants and the user may or may not click on ads while viewing that content, providing income back to the publisher.
As I said, there are some aggressive publishers out there, but it’s funny to me that someone who makes it possible to take away income from well-meaning publishers is begging for money to do it.