I pay for the things I care the most about, but your comment is making the assumption that other people can focus on a small number of high quality sites like you do, and that seems unrealistic with today’s web. I can’t afford enough money to pay to get rid of ads from my life, and I don’t want to limit my browsing to a tiny number of sites and never find anything new.

I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.

Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.