You get nearly everything for free

I dunno about you, but I pay around $50/month for internet access.

You are overpaying for access. Still that doesn't cover the content that you are browsing.

My compromise has been to use AdBlock but in manual mode. If an advertiser ticks me off I click on the block button and include all their servers. In the end, I do see some ads, usually for things I might actually be interested in.

How are you not paying for the content? It's like paying a video rental store a fee to get access to the movies you want to watch, then somebody saying, "Well, you're not paying for all the actors and the lighting technicians who made the film."

The internet existed, much of it ad-free, and it was popular, so people said, "how can we make money off this?" So they are doing what they have to do with the ads, but people naturally don't want to look at annoying things when they are trying to read something unrelated. Pop-up ads did not build the internet, the internet's popularity attracted the ads.

You're paying for Internet access, you're not paying for the content. By analogy: When you pay for gas to go to the movies, you're not also paying for the admission ticket to the movies.

Paying for Internet access and paying for content are two completely different things. Slate or YouTube or Hulu or CNN don't see a dime of the money you pay to Verizon or Comcast or whoever your ISP is. And conversely, your ISP doesn't see a dime of the money you pay to Apple to download iTunes content or the money you pay to Netflix to watch movies online.