Your thought experiment is a wish to pay more for better ads. Here's a better thought experiment: Person A has a need for a specialty product. Person B makes a perfect version of that specialty product. Who is going to be better at connecting Person A to Person B: Person A looking for what the fuck he wants or a faceless, shapeless, gerrymandered algorithm operating on imperfect information over an opaque network designed to abstract and obstruct the steady flow of information from Person A to Person B? By blocking ads, I keep the price of ads low. Things that do not work are not valuable. If the goal is to get an ad in front of me, and I make it so that ads don't get in front of me, I've taken the value of ads to ZERO. Advertising MUST suck by definition. You can solve that one by inspection. It is content that I did not ask for that interferes with the content that I did ask for and it does so through imperfect statistics. The approach taken by the Internet has been to get excruciatingly invasive in its statistics rather than recognize that as the system improves the advertising gets increasingly invasive. Even you, arguing that advertising could theoretically be useful, refer to it as "potential landmines." there is no part of my shopping experience that EVER needs "potential landmines." None of it. Zero. Zilch. This is why the casinos in Vegas chase the pornslappers away from the entrances: they're fucking bad for business.
Which is exactly the opposite of what I am championing. I want to know when flights to Reykjavik are below $500, because I am going there in March. If my Economist article is supported by ads for PRODUCTS I WANT AND AM CURRENTLY SHOPPING FOR, 100% of my screen real estate is valuable to me. Um. No. I said that the existing form of ads are screen landmines that are dangerous to click on. It is content that I did not ask for that interferes with the content that I did ask for and it does so through imperfect statistics.
Even you, arguing that advertising could theoretically be useful, refer to it as "potential landmines."
Google, the largest advertising organization in the world, will absolutely email you alerts whenever the price for a flight to Reykjavik goes below $500 in March. This thing that you think needs to be pushed at you via advertising is a three-click pull setup from the company that has 41% of the digital marketshare in the world. You're arguing that if your can opener were a better can opener it'd make a better daquiri. My argument is that can openers will never make decent daquiris.