Ad-blocking is a headache for many news sites trying to make enough money to fund quality journalism. And so far it seems no one has cracked the code to end this tug-o-war, writes Alex Kidman.

On the one hand, I love ad-blocking. There are numerous sites that abuse ad placement to a shocking degree, making their content hard to read and the ads hard to ignore, and there's little more satisfying than stripping out the junk to get to what you really want to read.

Strangely, I don't seem to need to know one neat trick to erase wrinkles, or where the "frisky" singles in my area are. Do the frisky singles have wrinkles? I'll never know, because I don't want those advertisements in the way of the content I want to consume.

Ad-blocking has more distinct advantages than just avoiding dodgy looking sales pitches. If you're browsing on a mobile device, then every ad you see is costing you direct money, thanks to the premium put on mobile data. You also gain the ability to remove tracking elements that may follow you across a multitude of sites, ostensibly to serve you "better" advertising, but also building up a profile of your online activities along the way.

Scrubbing the ad scripts from a site actively speeds page loading times, costs you less and improves the experience. It's hard to argue against that.

On the other hand, I can't ignore the fact that as a working journalist, ads have paid my wages for decades now. As journalists, we like to talk the talk about serving the greater good - and there's little doubt that some journalism does serve very noble causes - but the reality of journalism for anyone except those working for a public broadcaster is that ultimately the ads pay the bills, which means that they pay the salaries.

When ad-blocking applications themselves offer to whitelist publishers in return for payment, it's also hard not to come to the conclusion that they're operating something of a protection racket as well, although this does ignore user intent to a great extent.

Consumers don't like intrusive ads, and if they're honest, they don't like ads at all.

Media businesses are businesses, and the creation of content costs money, especially content of any reasonable quality. Publishers don't like ad-blocking because it's a direct hit to their revenue streams, and in the modern age those revenue streams are seriously disrupted anyway.

Newspapers have lost the rivers of gold that used to flow down the classified sections while magazines scrape by with meagre editorial teams and increasing quantities of widely syndicated content. When I started as a writer in the '90s, the magazine I worked for had an editorial team of about 15 people, plus magazine production staff. That title is still published today, with an editorial staff of no more than three people handling all tasks, and publishing two monthly magazines. This isn't uncommon in any way, and it reflects a media landscape where increasing numbers of older journalists are leaving the industry or taking a sideways path into other fields such as public relations or media management roles.

Online is the future, right? Online publications can only claim "exclusives" for as long as it takes the other thousand competitors to rapidly type up (or in many cases copy and paste) the exact same story.

Online, everyone's scrambling for ad spends that can be more precisely monitored than print ads can, but that way leads to more churnalism and less quality writing, especially if the users are actively blocking ads. It's worse than fast forwarding through a taped TV show if you never see the ads at all, because there's not even the hint of a brand impression to take away.

Which brings us to the problem: Nobody's yet come up with a fully crowd pleasing online model for how to cover the costs of quality content. The internet is awash with sensationalist rubbish that doesn't deserve its place, but that stuff crowds out the quality writing easily. I'm well aware that writing this on a national broadcaster's website is one way past the ads and ad-blocking dilemma.

Don't get me wrong, I love the ABC with a passion, but a single national voice in the media spectrum is not a healthy thing.

Some publications, such as the New York Times and Wired have experimented with auto-blocking the ad-blockers while appealing for micro-payments, but to date those kinds of paywall approaches haven't always worked - and I do worry about the effect of locking content of wide public appeal behind paywalls regardless.

You can always go down the affiliate purchases path (and to be clear, my current employer works on this exact basis) but that's not a model without its own challenges. Equally there's the Patreon model where those exceptionally happy with content supply ongoing funds, but that tends to favour the famous, and isn't suitable for every type of journalism anyway.

Then there's the spectre of so-called "native" content, where the line between advertising and journalism blurs markedly (to put it politely) to help pay the bills and keep the words flowing. It's the product placement version of writing, and it rarely leads to genuinely good content, although many marketers seem to love it.

The online world has disrupted plenty of industries, from public transport (think taxis v Uber) to traditional retail (Amazon versus... everyone else!) to entertainment (Netflix v Foxtel). Journalism isn't immune to that disruption, and it would be foolish to say that all types of journalism "deserve" funding.

At the same time, the role of responsible journalism across multiple interest types and niches is an important one, and simply allowing it to wither away is a worrying prospect. Whoever can figure out either the right ads balance, or a new method that serves both sides of the equation equally stands to do very well - if they last that long.

Alex Kidman is the Tech & Telco editor at finder.com.au, and a previous editor at CNET, Gizmodo and PC Magazine Australia, as well as widely published technology freelancer.