> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.
Yes – content creators should get paid. Also, not all ads are bad. Some campaigns even make such an impression on popular culture that they have their own place in history. But the campaigns that won't? Well, basically anything coming out of ad machines like adsense and what not.
Ads can be tasteful, even enjoyable, but most of the internet ads aren't. Unlike broadcast tv, you can block internet ads; it's easy to do, and you should. Not because it'll kill content creators or indie app makers[1] or whatever, because it won't. It'll hurt the revenue streams of shitty ad mongers like adsense and doubleclick and facebook and admob and what have you. These are – in my opinion – on the same shitty level as porn peddlers. They sell crap for pennies, but they win because you just won't reach out to everyone otherwise. Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of the shitty ad platform snake-oil salesmen are the broadcasters of today – and their messages suck.
Not only do their messages suck, but people – good people – spend valuable time they'll never get back in order to produce these shitty ads. Time they could have spent doing something useful. Instead they made a shitty flash banner that won't play anyway because everyone blocks flash.
Ads of this kind need to be blocked so we can get to a point where advertising can be good. Where it requires thought, effort, research. Where it requires smart people, creative people, coming up with things that matter and are contextually relevant. The shitty ads we have today need to be blocked to preserve bandwidth, and to help make our planet perhaps die a little bit less every year. Blocking ads on the internet is easy, and doesn't require fancy heuristics or anything. It just requires black lists and hive minds. Ads that are not peddled through "platforms" or however you'd like to describe it – sponsored articles like those on Daring Fireball or increasingly in news papers these days – are less easy to block, and require more effort. But those ads aren't annoying, and they may not be entirely relevant but at least you don't want to throw up because you're fed up with their bullshit. So it becomes a cost/benefit calculation – is it worth the time and energy to block all ads, or are some ads ok?
To me the answer to that is simple: ads are ok. The ad-porn that inflicts the internet today, through adsense and the rest of the ad-platform mob, can die a painful death in fire. Fuck 'em, I'm blocking their shitty ads left-right-center.
[1]: http://blog.desk.pm/df/