Dean Murphy on ad blockers:

Do I care more about my privacy, time, device battery life & data usage or do I care more about the content creators of sites I visit to be able to monetise effectively and ultimately keep creating content?

I'm with Dean here, it's a hard decision. As a "content producer" myself, I appreciate the need to pay people for the work they do. The internet as a whole has shown it is unwilling to pay for writing, so writers have to find a way to get paid.

On the other hand, as a reader I don't think it's fair that I'm agreeing to give all of my browsing history over to advertisers who will do god knows what with it. Ad blockers not only block the visual ads on a page, they also block sending your personal data to these companies.

I think if you are going to use an ad blocker, you should pay back the writers you like by linking to their stuff on social media and maybe buying their swag from time to time. I'm completely fine with you running an ad blocker on BirchTree.me if you then send 10 people my way and I get more views (some of which won't be using ad blockers). That seems pretty fair.