I make my living from advertisements but have had to enable blockers on certain sites which are not just aesthetically unusable but actually unusable because of ads. I'm talking to you Bon Appetit and Epicurious!
I just have stopped visiting sites with annoying ads like that. Which really means I have stopped visiting a lot of the free Web.
News? Economist and NY Times. Recipes? Cooks Illustrated.
Of course the Web is still useful to buy things from a merchant; there, the site obviously has no incentive to be annoying. And sometimes for free stuff it's better to go to the site of someone who is already selling you something. You mention Bon Appetit and Epicurious. If you want free recipes, go to food manufacturer's website or to a grocery store's website. They are loaded with free recipes and there are no annoying ads...of course, the whole site is an ad. But it has what you need.
I understand if sites have a business model that needs annoying ads. I just don't visit them. It seems hypocritical to me to visit the site while not respecting its business model, especially when there are other sites out there whose business model is more aligned with your needs. I would rather support them with my money or clicks rather than visiting annoying places and then installing more software to suppress annoyances.
Good points. We have actually recently started to just check cookbooks out from the library which is even more cost effective than a subscription to a site.
