> how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them?

Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.

I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site.

It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base.

And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody

> Not everyone want to pay for news.

People want things for free. Too bad. Nothing is really free. Either you pay for it, have ads, or have your taxes pay for it as part of public media. Personally, I'd like to see forced ads banned. Having ads that the user can come to see is fine (e.g. I'm looking for a product and I want to browse pitches, totally fine). That means that yes, we need a way where news can get paid. Most big news companies already offer paid tiers, they just continue to shove ads even then.

ads are not bad. if it's publisher ads/native ads.

the bad ad ecosystem is where there's whole demand, supply side platforms and ad exchanges that mine and sell your data.

now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience.

you're reading some article about EV's - then boom the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad - not serve you an ad about weight loss or viagra or any other shit stuff.

We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.

It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.

It's a tough question, I would be fine with ads if they were relevant to the content I'm looking at, minimal (ie; no motion, popups, covering up content), actually checked for safety so all the scam and phishing ads went away, and checked for performance so they didn't slow down a website so it's barely usable.

Maybe if adblockers become more widespread that will start to happen, right now ad networks seem to just allow anything.

Like if I'm reading a cooking article and there's an add to the side for some cooking gadgets or something like that, sure why not!

I would be fine with a mode where the ads were corralled at the bottom of the page, but not loaded, with a disclosure triangle which would then allow me the option of viewing them if the content was credible enough that it seemed to me that the site content creators could be trusted to have signed up for ads which might have merit.

> On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies?

I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).

When I look a decade ahead, I think the advertiser internet model is going to die. People won't be using search engines anymore. They'll be using LLMs. They won't be reading blogs anymore. They'll be asking their LLMs. They won't be looking at review or recipe or travel sites anymore. They'll ask their LLMs.

Of course this creates second order effects. If no one ever views the ads on the review and recipe sites, those sites will disappear. Then what do the LLMs reference? Parametric knowledge? Google is trying to get ahead of this with "Google Zero:" an internet in which one never leaves Google because they cache and serve everything a user could ever want. All stolen from other websites, of course.

I hope we end up back at the internet of the 90s. Small, unmonitised hobby spaces. Unfortunately bots will be 99% of all internet traffic within a few years, so how do we protect these spaces from unsolicited spam, disinformation campaigns, trolling, etc? We might actually go and touch some grass and re-learn how to socialise in person. This is not a bad thing.

Brave has it on both desktop and mobile https://brave.com/privacy-updates/34-block-page-elements-and...

Ladybird is natively integrating Brave's adblock engine https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/9587

You're right. My elderly mom has fallen victim, or nearly fallen victim at least, to tons of ads or sponsored spots served within Facebook, which are a bit harder to block. They can also outrun DNS-based block lists, probably because LLM's are allowing crooks to move faster and be more prolific.

I actually started making an LLM-powered browser extension that I thought could read the page and determine if it passed a smell test and block it if it didn't meet some strict criteria I'd set for her, but I didn't get very far before I became too concerned about prompt injection. Wanted to do the same on her e-mail, because gmail's built in filters sometimes let her down, but same concern. Prompt injection there may be trivial as well.

Its been a while since I've seen an ad on Youtube since I got premium, but I remember, at least for a while, every ad on there was a scam. At some point I think Google realized nobody would stop them, so they just started accepting anyone who wanted to advertise with them.

This in particular is not very difficult to verify

Not OP, but your comment had me looking into it: the fact that it's Firefox-based is reason enough to give it some consideration: the Chrome monopoly we are currently under is not compatible with a healthy and neutral web.