Usually direct response marketing (like ads to buy a game) is paid per click, so you weren't getting people charged before you started ad blocking, when you weren't clicking on the ad anyways.

And as a beside, people typically don't do direct response marketing to engineers, because it's known they don't click on ads and they're better marketed to through referrals from other engineers and online content (like this article).

I'd love an easy option to only include ads on sites that I trust, or that do ads well, and some reliable metrics surrounding that. Then content producers could get some feedback on "ad acceptance rates" and create better user experiences.

Now that I think about it, one of the most obnoxious things about online ads isn't that they are eerily intelligent, but that they are still mostly dumb forms of broadcast.