our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community
you don’t say
And if everyone blocked ads and couldn’t see sites that insisted on advertising, how would that work out for the websites?
Totally fine. That website does not at all benefit from your presence if you’re not paying them in any way (unless it’s a social media website).
Why have content on the web at all if it can’t be viewed by anyone? Even if generated with an intention to generate profit, there is no opportunity to do so if no one is looking at it.
Plenty of sites operate on advertising or paywall based methods or additional services beyond what they publicly offer.
The web is a lot of things not just free “journalism” and personal blogs.
This argument that all websites should just be free content that the author not only takes the time to write but actively loses money to host is just not realistic.