&gt; The recent &quot;golden age of television&quot; has been attributed to the increasing volume of paid content<p>Interesting, really? Do you have a source referring to this? The only theory I&#x27;ve heard is that as Hollywood studios have become financially more conservative (cf the dominance of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, etc relative to decades past), talent interested in taking risks has fled to television.<p>&gt;  Paid content on the web has been bad because there has been a glut of free content.<p>Right, and the glut of free content is facilitated by the incredibly low marginal cost of distribution. Buzzfeed has built their entire business on this: instead of &quot;writers&quot;, they have &quot;people with a spare ten minutes to Google a set of gifs&quot;[1].  I don&#x27;t see how this is a feature of the Internet that is going to disappear, especially since people have spoken loudly and clearly that, en masse, paid media will be ignored in favor of nominally free alternatives.  Your book example is particularly useful in proving my point: those books that aren&#x27;t encumbered by the monopoly power of copyright are freely available on Kindle or through Project Gutenberg.  TL;DR: As long as there&#x27;s a free alternative, people writ large won&#x27;t pay, and as long<p>&gt; I use an ad blocker because I&#x27;m not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people.<p>This is what bothers me about people who try to take the moral high ground about ad-blocking. How in God&#x27;s name do you come to the conclusion that &quot;not participating in a system&quot; is anything but &quot;not visiting those sites&quot;? If you think Beats headphones are priced more for brand than quality[2], do you go &quot;I refuse to participate in a system that overprices products based on fooling customers&quot; and then merrily shoplift your way through their inventory?<p>[1] Side note: I love this site.   <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] Note that I&#x27;m very uninterested whether people think Beats are fairly priced or not and don&#x27;t have an opinion about it myself; I&#x27;m not an audiophile and was just parroting something I&#x27;ve heard a bunch of times for the purposes of constructing a hypothetical. Please don&#x27;t respond to this comment arguing about Beats...