An advertising income is not a measure of how good your site is...
it's a measure of how good you can persuade the advertisers your site is. And when people are turning off your adverts in droves, well, you can deduce that *something* is upsetting them.
There is *no* website - no, el Reg, not even this one - which I would be persuaded to use if viewing the adverts were the only option. Advertising funding - i.e. selling eyeballs to advertisers - is not the only way to go, and if people won't accept it then the websites will have to find some other way of working, or they will disappear.
The arguments about avoiding advertising because of bandwidth, privacy, tracking, security, and other grounds have been rehearsed into the ground; I won't repeat them. There are too many sites which are pure clickbait, which exist only to get advertising money. Some of them provide services which many people find useful - social media sites, for example - but without which people managed quite well before they existed and without which they will no doubt manage once they vanish. As people begin to discover the disadvantages of the funding model they may also decide not to use them. On the other hand they may prefer to (gasp) pay for the use in some other way: if the site cannot find that new method then it will disappear.
As an observation: Facebook had a billion or so users and a turnover last year of around eighteen billion dollars (according to Wiki). So a user is worth an average of eighteen bucks a year to facebook... it's not a lot - would you pay it to avoid adverts? (I don't use it; I can't comment).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
