This is what Adblockers have done

See that screenshot above? It's from Jalopnik, Gawker's car related blog. What you should see there is a photo of a Land Rover crossing some rough terrain. Instead, you see an advertisement. To make matters worse, it's a Flash advertisement. Gawker sites already load slowly, do they really need more ads like this, blocking articles from view?

Yes, yes they do. The ad up there bypasses ad blocking plugins. Selling ad space is how blogs can afford to get you the news for free. On sites like this, it's not as important. I don't have employees, it's hosted on Google's servers, and I'm not expecting a paycheck (and over the 4+ years I've done this, I haven't seen a penny). But for sites like those on the Gawker network, that money is needed for the bloggers' and programmers' paychecks, as well as the cost of hosting sites with a large volume of traffic. Without ads, many writers and web developers would lose their jobs.

Besides, web advertisements aren't all bad. Compare the advertisements on websites to those seen in magazines or newspapers. There you pay for the content, and you get advertisements. At least web content is free! But, thanks to ad blocking plugins, web sites are having trouble making money off of their sites. And, as such, they've had to get creative, and unfortunately, more annoying. This is why we see ads before our videos play on Youtube or other sites, or why websites force viewers to watch an ad before going to the content. Websites need to make money somehow, and this is what it has come to.

As advertisements become more intrusive, ad blockers are going to become more necessary. It's a vicious cycle, because as ad blockers become more popular, advertisements will have to become more intrusive. The only way to break the cycle is for everyone to stop using ad blockers, and I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. Still, all it takes is a few trendsetters to ditch their ad blocker, and soon they'll be as unpopular as firing already broke writers (I'm assuming that most writers are broke). As long as we don't have to start paying to read content online, I'll be happy. There's no way I'm paying to read "FIRST!" after every story.