DaStarBug,
I would totally have agreed with you, even just last year, and especially 18 months ago. But Ad blocking software is now moving beyond the 'Early Adopter' tech savvy stage. It is increasingly easy to add a plugin in to Browsers, and more people are doing it. Top publishers have already moved to act and are already ahead of the curve, they all run at least one <noscript> ad in the premium ad location.
The internet is heavily polluted by Advertising on very poor quality sites (and I am not just taking about MFA sites, an e.g. is the Daily Mail Newspaper, who run about 13 ads per page on fluff journalism pieces, its horrendous). I use an Ad blocker, and I'm a Publisher!
You have to look beyond what is 'now' to what is 'going to be' and going to be soon ... while the number of people blocking ads and javascript remains below 10% then all is well, and most people are not being affected, but when it moves above 10% then there is a problem. 1 in 10 people blocking your Ads is 10 in a 100, or 100 people in a 1,000 etc. And when you are having over 1,000 unique visitors a day (which is not a very big site) you can see the issue, 100 people are not seeing your Ads which pay for your content creation. In terms of the New York Times with 40 million unique's a month you can see the size of the problem.
Do you blame people for blocking Ads, no, there is so much 'cr@p' out there that it is inevitable that more people are going to find a way of filtering this annoyance out.
But I only run two ads on a page (sometimes three) and NEVER in the content, one ATF and one BTF, I do not annoy my visitors, as any good publisher should do, but I am suffering because of the idiotic actions of the majority.
So I fight back (without annoying my visitors, by keeping it discreet) My Direct Advertisers in the ATF spot run <javascript> ads from a third-party server, but I also provide a <noscript> alternative for them which is pulled from my URL structure on my site if it is needed (a static copy image of their ad, with an 'onclick' event) - just like the New York Times does. Now I only run one <noscript> ad in the code because less than 10% of the time it is shown - but how soon will it reach more than 10%? And my data shows these <noscript> ads do get clicked on and convert, which is the ultimate test.
Take a look at Google Ads on Premium Advertiser Sites - they are running their <javascript> ads but have a look they are also running a <noscript> alternative which gets shown. Most times it is a 1x1 tracking pixel ... now why are they running this? They are gathering data on a growing problem, because this problem is growing and they will need to switch to a different way of showing ads to not only combat the ad blocker but also devices and browsers with JScript turned off ... I could go into this but this would require at least 1000 words of explanation, basically <javascript> ads from a third-party server are dead men walking ... and google are working on alternative methods right now ...
But yes, no scare stories from me, as of right now, with this problem under 10% it is something you can put on the back burner if your target audience is not tech savvy ... and by the time it is a problem, if you are not running Direct Advertising, Google Adsense will roll out a fix for it ... whatever shape this may take.
