Ben'Pay to remove ads' is such an awful insidious now common phrase. Give us money or else we'll do this to you. If you don't pay us, we will control your experience. We will force ourselves upon you unless you meet our demands. Modern day protection racket.
Jeff MacKinnon@TheBreadmonkey In at lot of cases they remove the ads, but keep the tracking. So I just keep the blocking and don't pay.
I block the ads to block the internet wide tracking of my activity, not to hurt the site. If they used their own ad servers (which they can, its 2005 tech), then the ads wouldn't be blocked.
The BIG sites could easily do that, they already have ad sales people, might be harder for smaller operations.