I don't believe the market will balance itself at all. Online publishers are reliant on advertiser revenue, and there's far too much ad space to fill solely with useful ads for useful products. At the same time, the vast majority of AdBlock users block almost everything - including the 'useful ads for useful products' and the high-value branded advertisements that pay by the impression and really don't care whether you click on them or not, just as long as you see them.
Right now, online publishers view ad blocking as an annoying evil not worth combatting - under the assumption that <5% of all users block advertisements, that the users that do often aren't advertisers' most desirable demographic, and that playing cat-and-mouse with ad blockers is more annoying than it's worth. But as the percentage of users using ad blockers rises, more online publishers will be open to technical solutions to this problem. I know of multiple projects that incorporate server-to-server ad calls (so the ads are served from the same domain as the content) and slicing of ads into multiple smaller images (so the ads aren't standard IAB image sizes, but chunks of the key content are.) Other projects I've seen tie the presence of advertising to key site functionality, making it impossible to use the site effectively without referencing a visible advertisement. As ad blocking increases to the point where it's material to publishers, blocking ad blocking will spawn a lot of startups.
There's already a good example of this: the increasing use of Local Shared Objects (also known as 'Flash cookies') to store data formerly stored in cookies and even to respawn data in deleted cookies. Use of Local Shared Objects for advertising purposes was extremely rare several years ago. As the proportion of users regularly deleting the cookies that contained unique IDs for ad targeting and frequency capping crept up, the market didn't 'balance' by forgoing unique identifiers in cookies - it found a technical workaround by repurposing rarely-deleted LSOs.
I never really understand it when ad-blocking advocates evangelize to the general public - the more there are, the more likely it is that their blocking will in turn be blocked.
No, not really. You can subscribe to different block lists, but last I checked the goal of all the lists (or at least all the default lists) is to block all ads.
And anyway many of the block rules target ad networks and platforms. One site may use doubleclick.net's ad servers to serve up great, well-targeted ads and someone else may use the same system to server really obnoxious ads.
Personally, I don't subscribe to any lists and add all the block rules by hand. I really just don't want anything that moves or talks to me. But it ain't easy.
If ad-blocking got popular and sites tried to get past it I believe those sites would likely lose some of the customer's respect as they would be disrespecting the customer.
Which site do you want to go to:, the annoying one that forces you to watch an ad, or the one that just has a few less-obtrusive ads that you might block? Which one is going to benefit more from network effects and draw in more users?
Right now, online publishers view ad blocking as an annoying evil not worth combatting - under the assumption that <5% of all users block advertisements, that the users that do often aren't advertisers' most desirable demographic, and that playing cat-and-mouse with ad blockers is more annoying than it's worth. But as the percentage of users using ad blockers rises, more online publishers will be open to technical solutions to this problem. I know of multiple projects that incorporate server-to-server ad calls (so the ads are served from the same domain as the content) and slicing of ads into multiple smaller images (so the ads aren't standard IAB image sizes, but chunks of the key content are.) Other projects I've seen tie the presence of advertising to key site functionality, making it impossible to use the site effectively without referencing a visible advertisement. As ad blocking increases to the point where it's material to publishers, blocking ad blocking will spawn a lot of startups.
There's already a good example of this: the increasing use of Local Shared Objects (also known as 'Flash cookies') to store data formerly stored in cookies and even to respawn data in deleted cookies. Use of Local Shared Objects for advertising purposes was extremely rare several years ago. As the proportion of users regularly deleting the cookies that contained unique IDs for ad targeting and frequency capping crept up, the market didn't 'balance' by forgoing unique identifiers in cookies - it found a technical workaround by repurposing rarely-deleted LSOs.
I never really understand it when ad-blocking advocates evangelize to the general public - the more there are, the more likely it is that their blocking will in turn be blocked.