The model you presented might work for webcomics or some indie devs (I drew a connection to the main topic of the forums, hoho!), because these people can - if they're lucky and/or good enough - acquire a fanbase big and willing-to-spend enough to get their daily lives financed by selling merchandise. Of all great webcomics, how many can get to this point? 1 percent? 0.01?
Now you may argue that this is what people do for a hobby and that it doesn't have to pay for their lives (using your fantastic argument of juvenile jealousy, "I don't get money out of my hobby, why should anybody else? hur hur hur"). This is where your thinking should have made one logical step forward: There are many, many people who earn their daily income with the internet.

Let's take a big news site, for example German site "Spiegel Online". It's okay if you don't know them, they're German, you're Slovenian. They're the news magazine that earns most money with their site, and, if I remember correctly, the only online news magazine that is self-sustaining. That means they earn enough to cover their expenses. Expenses like web hosting and - more importantly - paying editors, journalists, video columnists etc. etc. money for their work.

You might suggest that if people read Spiegel Online so much, SpOn could just prominently ask its readers to buy a mug or two on their front page and then they're okay. That would blatantly underestimate the money that's made via advertising. Banner ads on the site cost advertisers up to 60.000 Euro (*). That's per day. There are many ads (since there are many different subsites. I don't mean that the site is plastered with ads. Just preventing a snappy remark here). You catch my drift, right? You'd have to sell quite a lot of mugs to make up for that money. And as I said, they're just profitable, according to my memory (been a few months since I read about this).

You can extend these figures to more or less any bigger sites on the internet. You have to realize that a lot of services and sites on the net are only possible because people can spend eight or more hours a day on them. That makes "earning a living doing that" a necessity.
When adblock users grow in amount, that will not go unnoticed by advertising people (this is a business sector inhabitated by many very clever people). First thing that happens is that prices for advertising go down. Worst thing that may happen is the advertising system collapses.

*Source: http://www.quality-channel.de/deutsch/qcpartner__preise/spiegel_online/festpreise.php

Awesome, thanks for putting a server up, Don Andy. Much fun was had on Hideous' playground, and the fun shall continue this weekend! :O

You demonstrate a severe case of arsefaceism, Mipey. It would be healthy to stop worshipping the god of Social Darwinism. Do it successively, in small steps, so that the withdrawal syndromes don't kick in too badly.


/edit

Aww, all the arsefacism has been edited

Maybe you should stop visiting websites such as LOOK-AT-NUDE-VAGINAS-DOT-COM.com. Or go visit those, block their ads, and don't block other sites' ads.
See, I know there are very asshole-ish ads. Things that popup all over the screen and basically force you to F5 a page, and things that hurt you with loud sounds. Those suck. I block those too. /// Be aware though, the amount of these ads has been tremendously shrinking in the last two years, the only sites I know that still use them are all kind of dodgy sites (one click hosters popular with the warez scene, porn sites etc.). This is no valid argument to use adblock with a "BLOCK ALL ADS, I FEEL LIKE A FUCKING KING TODAY" filter set, which is the most common use of it, as far as I gathered.

PGGB: I think that's already how adblock works. But people aren't dumb, you see.
Advertisement is paid so that it reaches website visitors. People pay money to sites so that adverts reach people. If adverts are blocked, and don't reach people as they should, they will stop paying for adverts. Since advertising is a fine and very comfortable way (especially for the website user who then doesn't have to subscribe or be asked to donate or whatever) to finance a website, that would be a very bad thing, for the obvious consequences. If you disagree, see corpus' reply.

Rigorously blocking all ads on every website is the proper equivalent to being a fucking arseface irl.

I get about 3500, 90% of those are related to me. Most of them are direct links to articles I wrote or whatever. I'm a bit disappointed I can't find nude pics with my name. Any ideas how to change that? Because I got a few ideas, but I doubt I'll ever be drunk enough.

Reminds me of Fred & Sharon Movies on Youtube.

Wearing a hat all the time can't be good for your scalp.

I'm surprised you have a seemingly high opinion of German police. If I was told correctly, the ground-level officers come from Hauptschule, and thus feel like society has treated them as part of the lowest caste and they have an axe to grind. Maybe it's just the person who told me this.

Nope, you can't even go to the police unless you have abitur, as far as I know. And sure, there's dicks in German police too, but overall, they're okay people.
One recent anecdotes: I jaywalked, right in front of a cop car (duuuh...). They then followed me, stopped their car at the sidewalk, ran across the street to stop me, I expected to lose a lot of money, but instead, they just told me that I should check that the traffic lights show green next time I cross the street. They smiled all the time. Then they left.

It will also cause you to lose all your hair, but as long as you wear the hat, noone will be able to tell. And thus, your head became the host of Schroedinger's Hair.

Policemen in Germany are really cool usually. Just saying.
It's part of Amarica, I guess. From the outside it sometimes looks like it's bordering a police/fascist state.

Maybe NSFW

Now that's scary.

I really like this, how it makes a point, only to ridicule this point a few moments later, and then do it again. Good fun how it constantly works against itself to a point where the whole thing borders on schizophrenia.

I didn't get the feeling that it would have "a message" on whether 'art games' are dull or not, since it mocks and pseudo-mocks everything it does. It pretends to be an art game only to ridicule itself for that, which in turn makes it an art game again. Fun fun fun.

With the Art Game "Team Fortress 2", Valve demonstrated in impressive clarity the differences and qualities of the economic systems "capitalism", "communism" and a society based and classified by racist values using a live and highly metaphorical example in three cycles - all involving their whole player base.

In the early days of Team Fortress 2, before the class-specific updates were introduced, the premisses and game-given qualifications for every player were the same. Noone had any materialistic advantage compared to any other players. A person's well-doing was entirely depending on his own skills. At the end of the day, a player might be better than his teammates, but no unfair advantage will get between their comradeship.

Then, Valve introduced the element of unlockable extras, luxurious items. It divided the player field into the Haves and the Have-Nots. A player who does well in the game is now not the better player, he is gratified with an affluence the less fortunate players cannot achieve. (Here it is only fair to mention that Valve's capitalism had an "American Dream" twist - a player who works hard and steadily enough will - over a longer time period - finally achieve his goals of Owning, of Having. Yet it must be noted that the power - the happiness - of this Having only works in relation to Have-Nots who own less).

The last cycle of Valve's important lesson started just today, when Valve introduced racial segregation into their game. The membrane-ous model of acquiring item affluence which gave players a way to measure their abilities' worth has now been replaced by a system that classifies people as "lucky" and "unlucky" - synonymous to the "white" and "black" population in slave-time America, for example. The white population of Team Fortress 2 effortlessly wins the new cool items doing seemingly nothing - they are being rewarded for their pure genetical characteristics. The poor blacks can try as they might, all they will get in their lifetime of playing the game will be dozens of duplicate, worthless weapons - and that's if they get anything at all.

To derivate a clear meaning or messages from Valve's behaviour is not an easy task. What can be said though, I guess, is that Valve value communism's power to unite people all over the world and to be a constant source of happiness for the entire population, not just the gifted upper 20 percent. Another clear warning, it seems to me, is that "it can always come worse".

I always loved nintendo promotional videos, especially the ones they made for the N64 in Europe/Germany. 8>

A TIGSource server would be amazing, Hideous! I've not played TF2 in what feels like months, but this new update really excites, since spy is an interesting class. Of course, there'll be millions of spies running around (and about as many pyros), but still! So yeah, keep us updated about the server.

Date is fixed! July 31st - August 3rd is the timeframe. (just got back from Berlin, more info soon!)

You did fuck up that strawman you set up there, congrats.

Casual game is an euphemism the industry invented for "bad game". Sadly, the games press media, mindless as usual, accepted this ludicrous bullshit - people did know and notice that games labelled as "casual" were shit when this whole farce began, remember? But nonetheless they stepped ahead and willingly adopted the "concept" of "casual game" into their vocabulary as if it was some kind of new genre - and now we have challenge-less, shallow shit like PvZ being accepted as a good game because of the "high polish and production values" ("candy").

I'd say it's rare for mags to send out issues to people covered. When I've contacted game mod developers to be featured in a few German print mags, all I could (usually) offer them was a PDF scan of the respective article. Mailing Print issues around was quite the exception, and it only happened for really awesome mods or exclusive deals (ie. "we can have your mod on our DVD, but no other German mag can"). It's a financial and organisational hassle to send out dozens of magazine issues throughout the world every month. Such is the way of the world.