I have long been a religious user of ad blocking software.  Since the first plugin for Firefox back in the day, and now I use adblock across the board (chrome, firefox, and safari).

I particularly hate ads on sites that I pay for (NY Times, I am looking at you), or where my information is the principal value to the company behind that site (Google and Facebook fall into this category).  But occasionally, I run into a site that politely asks me to not block their ads.

When I do, 99 times out of 100, I add that site to my exclude list. Today that was http://phys.org, a physics news site that I visit occasionally. They had a message bar to alert me to my use of an ad blocker (which I just don’t think about).  When I find this unobtrusive reminder, I add their domain to my exclude list, and deal with the ads. They are almost always just a few banner ads, and nothing truly annoying.

I did try using noscript and ghostery, but that pretty much destroyed the joy of web browsing (almost as much as my experimentation with TOR).

Of course, occasionally, I browse with IE and I am inundated with ads, so I am never ever going to go adblock free.