If you look at the benchmark results, aggressively stripping ads and tracking can result in pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life. I'm happy to pay money to view your website, but modern web ads are a ridiculous and punitive payment scheme.
What you're doing is the equivalent of walking into a store, picking up $100 of merchandise, slapping $10 on the counter and walking out because "I'm happy to buy your products, but your prices are ridiculous". It's not a very moral position to take.
gorhill makes a moral argument on the other side of yours [1]:
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.
Your analogy is flawed because it assumes the customer walking into the store retains their privacy and is not charged any hidden costs.
A more accurate example would be one in which the customer walks into a store that:
* data mines as much about that person as possible to profile them
* sells that data without consent to unvetted global buyers
* increases the risk that customer's devices are compromised (drive-by malware installs through ad placements on mainstream sites)
* charges them a hidden surprise fee (in the form of increased data usage, battery usage etc from poorly-designed ad systems).
Presenting naive analogies is harmful to our ability as a society to reason about the costs of systems like this.
I'd urge anyone to have a read and/or follow Ad Fraud Historian to understand how bad / harmful the existing ad-tech ecosystem is. [2]
It's truly awful, and anything that moves the internet away from this dystopian, incompetent and fraudulent monetisation approach to content is doing all of humanity a huge favor.
I'm much more sympathetic to the privacy point of view than the "pages loading twice as fast and hours of extra battery life" is my right so I'm going to remove your ability to make money so I can have your content faster.
The people most impacted aren't the entitled well-off first world citizens you allude to, but second and third world citizens and youth.
The rational choices of market participants do not remove the ability of sellers to sell, but they certainly do create more economic pressure for sellers to find and support better systems.
Also consider that the problem is not audiences vs publishers. It's corrupt middlemen harming audiences (privacy / malware / hidden costs) and defrauding publishers (fake traffic, bots, perverse incentives).
At this stage Brave's system of on-device ML in-browser for relevance and privacy, and opt-in ads seems a much better model, and I'm sure others will pop-up too.
We seem to be on the cusp of much better approaches to funding content, so it's really up to us to start advocating and supporting these new approaches.
Society has created legally enforceable ways to be compensated for copyrighted content. If you choose not to take advantage of those mechanisms, whose fault is that?
What you're describing is clear theft. Blocking ads is much grayer, since there's no real cost being charged by the site. I'd say it's closer as an analogy to say going to a store and using the bathroom but not buying anything.
