People who think they can put up a website with some content and make money purely from people visiting it and nothing else are incredibly naive. In this day and age, everyone and his dog wants you to look at their site. There is a content glut.<p>In the context of making money, a website is something which provides an enhanced service front end for an existing business which makes money in some other way. We expect every business we interact with to have some kind of web presence, even if minimally functional. (If nothing more, than at least a static page with the address and opening hours). Maintaining the site is a <i>business expense</i>.<p>Sites which don't have a business attached, are just someone's hobby. Complaining about AdBlock is just "Waaah, you're not paying for me for viewing the results of my hobby."<p>(What's worse; most of the content is self-promotional, so it's more like, "Waah, you're not paying for reading my opinions and my self-promotion.")<p>I don't care if some website perishes because it couldn't make money. The web would be better off if all such sites went away, leaving only the sites that provide a "web presence" for a real business, and the sites of those people who have something to present <i>and</i> the money to put it out there.<p>If you can't fund a web site entirely out of your own pocket, you basically don't belong on the web. You're not able to put "your money where your mouth is", literally.<p>There is commercially valuable content out there that people will pay for. That content proves itself to be that way because it can be put behind a "pay wall", and still sustain the site. People do pay for content; look at the growing subscribership of Netflix, for instance.<p>That provides us with a good litmus test: <i>can your content be pay walled such that your site at least breaks even financially?</i> If not, then it has insufficient commercial value. If you still want people to view it, that means <i>you have an agenda</i>. Your agenda is a promotional one, and it goes something like this: "this content is somehow valuable to <i>me</i>, and I want others to know it and like it." If you have such an agenda, it falls upon you to <i>fund</i> it. Ironically, just like those business whose ads you serve through your site are paying to promote <i>their</i> agenda!<p>Also, there is an irony in web advertizing is that it only generates revenue when people click on the ads. But when people click on ads, what are they doing? They are <i>navigating away</i> from the content to look at something <i>more interesting</i>. The theory is that the original site's content "brought" people to the advertizement. But in fact that is not true. What actually happened is more like this: someone was searching for content, and landed on the site. The site turned out to be garbage, filled with stuff not relevant to the search. But, oh, an interesting ad caught the visitor's eye; and so off that visitor went.<p>Hypothesis: <i>When people actually click on ads, it's because your content is worse than garbage, so that going to the ads is a more attractive alternative. The content is just search engine bait to get people to the ad, nothing more.</i>