Not simply because I find them unpleasant or obtrusive, or that others do. Rather I am convinced that they are a "coal mine canary" that is warning us of impending economic collapse.

A few days ago, via HN I found a chart of advertising spend as a proportion of the GDP since the 1920s or so. It is just about always 2%. So if the economy is booming, then advertising will boom in a sense, but at no more than 2% of the economy.

The problem we've got is that it is very easy to make a new website, and it is not hard at all to attract people to it, however it is quite difficult to come up with ways to monetize a website other than by publishing ads.

Consider eCommerce - you need warehouses, people to ship the product, you have to deal with charging credit cards and so on.

But sites like mine, I just publish lots of articles and essays. When I first tried adsense, within just a couple of hours I could tell that I would earn three grand that month. Signing up for adsense then implementing it in my website was quite a lot easier than it would have been to monetize my site by selling a physical product.

Key to my concern is that the number of websites is growing far faster than either the GDP or the population. So there is less and less advertising money to go around.

The typical response is to try harder to convince visitors to your site to click your ads. Hence we have what I first complained about - "Like us on Facebook" before I can even find out whether I actually do like the content.

Eventually this house of cards is going to break down, in my specific case I have installed Privacy Badger and noscript, and I also blackhole analytics servers in my hosts file: "127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com".

In many respects a good solution is to operate a website just like my own: I don't use it to earn money. I earn money by working as a coder, however my site helps me to promote myself.

But there are many sites with very sizeable costs. Look how much it costs to serve Facebook.