Bottom line – don’t kick against a brick wall. Those determined to block ads (such as myself) will do it, and will figure out a way around your anti-blocking mechanisms in a fraction of the time it took for you to implement them. Instead of wasting time trying to fight the ABP crowd, find a new and unobtrusive way to monetize your site, such as self-hosted text ads. Yes, it will require more work, but the good news is that the market will dissolve most of the absolute crap found online and leave only the useful content.

But the main issue is that ads manage to annoy people who don’t really want to block the ads – and in my experience there are many more of those. Blinking and making sounds brings you more clicks (at least in the short term). So we certainly have an economical problem here – alienating your customers seems to be the best business strategy at the moment. This is something Adblock Plus could change, by forcing advertisers to look for better strategies before they lose all the good will most people still show towards them.

I really don’t think Adblock Plus will destroy the Internet – neither did popup blockers. They only changed the way advertising works on the Internet, for the better. Forgive the shameless plug but I discussed some economical aspects of this question here: http://adblockplus.org/blog/ads-dont-generate-money

Pop-up blockers are in mainstream usage but I don’t think advertisers have a right to use pop-ups anyway.

Ultimately you can no more stop people blocking ads than you can stop them fast-forwarding or channel surfing through TV commercials. I think it’s the right of the user to block ads if they have the will to do so. If someone’s annoyed enough by advertising to block it then they’re not going to be clicking ads anyway.

Widespread blocking of ads won’t make Web sites go out of business and we won’t be the poorer for it. Instead, new business models will arise, and MORE and BETTER content will appear.

Micropayments *can be* affordable to everyone.

If you looked at one page per minute and wanted to replace a $5 CPM, you’re on the hook for 30 cents per hour. You can afford that, just like your $3.50 mocca frappa presso chino.

Look at your cable bill; you already pay for content. You just pay too much, because it’s all bundled together. Micopayments could enable you to pay less for disaggregated, premium gems and lower consumers’ overall media bill. It’s only a question of when low friction alternatives kick in.

By paying for content, value could accrue to good, interesting and useful content, not just content that is suitable for others to advertise against.

In the same way AdSense / AdWords made advertising work for so many publishers, we need low-friction alternatives to advertising that are affordable to consumers and reward content creators more than ads do today.

One thing to consider is the Henry Ford approach: If those of us who depend on the net for our income also buy on the net, we are paying “ourselves” the same way the early Ford workers became the customers for the product they were producing.

This doesn’t mean you need to block or not block ads, simply that buying online strengthens the online incomes for all of us.

Well, the reason I block ads is not because I object to advertising, but because I cannot STAND anything moving on a web page I’m trying to read. I loathe animated ads, and I won’t ever have any on my site. I also resent the distraction of pop-up ads.

And for the record, I have been a paid subscriber of Salon for years, I’ve donated to other sites that provide valuable information, and I’ll gladly click on a sponsored search result if it’s of interest to me.

If advertisers quit using popups and animated, flashing, blinking ads, I will happily uninstall my adblock software.