Mousseau covered a lot of good points, but I'll drop in some advertising education here.
Your point here is actually the reason that AdBlock is so destructive to websites.
The person running the ad knows that they want to advertise on television. The person running the ad on television knows a bunch of things about television - viewership statistics are inflated, people not only mute ads but PVR the shows, and that Television is the single best influencer in traditional media. So that brand selling toothpaste has no choice but to accept the viewership statistics that TV network gives them, and those inflated numbers.
Its actually a reason that a lot of ads are starting to push online. You get tracking, you only pay for views that actually get seen and you can see exactly what your customers did after clicking on said ad. Fantastic for the advertiser... all of a sudden they don't have to tolerate waste.
For an online publisher, as Jason said - we have an issue. Long ago many online publishers decided to break the traditional media model where you both paid for your content and viewed advertising all over it. We decided heck - if people are going to look at ads might as well give the shit away for free - that is only fair.
AdBlock changes the game because it actually stops the ad call from going back to the server. So the advertiser never even knows that the view happened, and as such is never billed for the ad view. Great for the advertiser, but the online publisher can only charge for what actually happens - and as such its simply lost revenue for us.
To boot, we only have the exact stats we report, so we don't have these crazy over-inflated "We're in 22 million homes!" type of statements we can make to advertisers. So we can't lie about how many people we reach, and we can't lie about exactly how many ad views they saw.
This is the reason you're seeing paywalls being erected around content everywhere. Users simply are breaking the arrangement of free content in exchange for advertising views. Sure you may philisophically say "Fuck that, I can install AdBlock and view whatever I want." - and you're right - the problem is that we aren't able to pay for what you want to view. Sadly, the really good content still costs money to buy, create or whatever. Every day that a new awesome am production company starts posting rad edits is a day that a slightly older and more seasoned production company realizes they can't be giving their shit away for free.
Every time someone puts NS on their whitelist, you help us just a little bit more. As Jason said, we're dumping anything we can right now right back into paying those content creators who need money to keep making their content. So the more ads you view, the more you contribute back to the system directly.
I'm not stupid enough to think that we can turn everyone. I know there is people out there that are going to no matter what vview Newschoolers ad-free, and there isn't a ton I can do about that. The only thing that you may see happen is that if we want to take content to the next level, we'll need to look at other opportunities to raise revenue. Money must somehow flow from the end user into the NS coffers, so that we can run a business and push that revenue back out into our economy of content creators.
So if you use AdBlock, and you refuse to whitelist NS - consider making regular small donations, buying shirts or suggesting ideas for what you would do to contribute back to the system.
