The use of ads as the primary revenue source for publishers and others seems to have occurred (evolved) as an unplanned path of least resistance. It's not just down to people being cheapskates and preferring free stuff but is I think linked to how today's internet came about, its formative history, its academic, pre-commercial background and the community-driven idealism that drove it.
Elements of that still exist in pockets but it's dwarfed now by the commercial focus that seeks to monetise the few billion internet users, principally through surreptitiously tracking their behaviour and mining their privacy (because it's not visible, few people have much of an idea of the extent to which their behaviour is being tracked, recorded, modelled). The typical marketers response to disgruntled consumers taking steps to protect themselves from such tracking is that if only the marketers had more and better data about you then they could provide you with more compelling and relevant ads that you'd like to see:
http://www.bandt.com.au/marketing/ad-bl ... iamath-cmoWhen these tracking systems also deliver malware onto people's devices, taking steps to protect yourself with ad blockers and privacy protection tools appears a very rational response.
These actions are not normally aimed at people running sites like this one where there is much goodwill to the hosts (and regardless of that goodwill, in comparison to most sites the ads here seem very low key and unobtrusive). Any ranting about ads is not as a result of sites like this, but since by default these tools block stuff everywhere, then such sites may get caught in the crossfire. The delivery of malware through ad networks is not really under the control of the host site, which has made people more reluctant to make exceptions for specific sites because of the risk this may pose; many legitimate sites sometimes have and will continue to expose their readers to malware unwittingly and unintentionally.
I don't know what the answer to all this is: like the old directions to Dublin answer, it'd probably be better if we weren't starting from here. The privacy issues are getting worse not better as we move increasingly towards a few 'walled gardens' delivering services and away from the more open Internet of yore, although these walled gardens being more controlled may mean less malware risk.
Out of interest, does this site earn revenue based on ad impressions or just click throughs/actions? ie. if people who block ads would in any case ignore them, is that still costing the site money?