Advertising isn't inherently evil. At its best it actually adds value to the viewer. Consider the ads in bridal magazines or during the Super Bowl.

Perhaps the NYTimes can pull off a paywall (we'll see soon enough), but most content producers can't. So where does that leave us? Micropayments? Would you really want to pay to Tweet?

Neither quite here nor there: I noticed recently that DuckDuckGo has signed up with Carbon Ads for their website advertising, and I really like it.

I've been an ardent ad-blocker for years now, and I'm actually glad Carbon Ads gets past the filter, because the ads it shows look great, somehow manage to get my attention without competing for it, and are showing some pretty neat services that I hadn't heard of before.

+1 for niche ad networks that know their audiences.

I recently added Influads (similar to carbon) on one of my side projects, and I actually got a complement about the ads from a user! That was the last thing I expected.

I love these ads because they work as a filter for new products I might be interested in.

The ad networks are selective about the companies they accept.

Google ads are actually a lot less obnoxious than any other company's ads that I have come across.

The other question is whether a lot of site that display ads do actually profit from them. Many users have ad blockers installed or turn away as soon as they see any kind of blinking banner (I do).

I'd argue that those most likely to use Adblock and similar addons are those least likely to ever click on them. My (quite anecdotal) observation is that many less technologically minded users notice and click on ads, while more experienced users see only the content and grow tired of flashing in their peripheral vision.

That hypothesis extends partially to why Hacker News and similar are so different from, for example, the much messier layout of cnn.com.

If there were a <noads> tag to serve different content to people who will never ever click ads, I'd love to use it.

Maybe some people actually do want to keep most websites free and don't mind the Google ads and sometimes even find them interesting. (Yes, it may be hard to admit for some people but sometimes the ad is actually right what you want/need.)