Re: Advertising weary?
"Personally I tolerate apps and websites that have reasonable levels of advertising (like ElReg)"
Personally, I don't. I have a no-holds-barred approach to blocking advertising (Pi-Hole, Blokada, and uBlock Origin are my weapons of choice) because most ads these days are insanely intrusive (I find El Reg's liberal spraying of advertising on the side banners to be unbearable), and then there's are the tracking and malware issues brought up already by other posters. I think paywalls are a perfectly valid approach to preventing "freeloading" by ad blockers, and if a site wants to use ad-blocker blockers, that's also fine by me in terms of me going elsewhere. Advertising has become so prevalent, pervasive, and pernicious, however, that for the sake of my own sanity and for the well-being of my various computers, I do my best to avoid consuming it as much as possible.
And don't even get me started on auto-play video ads, especially on mobile.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
