I read an article recently that pointed out that an episode of a TV show is effectively an advertisement for the next TV show in the series. Propaganda certainly has the connotations that you're looking for, but in English it's typically used to refer to a certain class of political ads. I get what you're saying, though, and I think the proper response is education.

Craigslist is great, and I might consider a subscription to Salon.com if it were inexpensive enough, but I think you're overestimating humanity's willingness to part with cash. All you have to do is look at just about ANY paid app on an iPhone or (especially) Android, and you'll find people complaining that it should be free.

Just a few years ago, buying a small game for your computer would cost from $7-$20. Now people complain if a game costs $1, even if the game contains dozens of hours of entertainment value. It's not like it costs less to make a polished game now than it did a few years ago.

And if a game is fun enough and has enough replay value, I can actually make more than the $0.70 I make from a $1 sale by showing the users ads (considering I get 200x as many downloads of a free version). Other models do exist -- in-app payments for buying "coins" to play a game more, for example -- but some of those end up feeling more evil than the advertising you're decrying.

What you'd need to fight is the sense of entitlement that people have around web content, which is what game developers have to fight on Android. I mean, just look at the comments on this very article! We're talking HN readers who feel entitled to get everything for free. People who have no connection with web site creation or running a business will typically have even less of a personal connection to the companies that they're hurting when disabling ads.

Micropayments for news sites could happen if you got the right sites to buy in, but it's been tried again and again, so I suspect that it's the lack of customers rather than the lack of site support that's the problem. If you got the New York Times, Salon.com, and a half dozen other high-profile sites to join a micropayment network, so I could sign up ONCE and go to a lot of different news sites ad free, I'd like that as a customer. But I suspect that you'd see the same ratio of 200x as many people sticking with the "free" ad-supported sites.

But then again, it would be a hard sell for the New York Times, at least: They want $35/month for a full digital subscription. That's off by at least a factor of ten from what I'd be willing to pay, possibly more. I think I'd be willing to pay $8/month to a micropayment network that included unlimited access to at least a dozen or so sites ad-free, but the NYT is demanding a much higher payment for unlimited access, so it's hard to believe they'd take a much lower amount.

Finally, I wouldn't want the micropayments service to charge me every time I looked at a site. I don't want to think about using the web; I want to browse freely, without worrying that I'm spending money every time I click a link. So those micropayments would need to come out of a monthly flat rate, to be divvied up among the various sites I'd actually visited.