With the notable exception of AdBlock Plus (which has its own problems) the big ad block plugins tend to be philosophically opposed to all ads of any type, quality or quantity. This is a bummer for sites like ours where the ads are sold directly to advertisers (no network) and are relevant to the audience and subject matter.
It's actually kind of amazing how many wrong notes this 2-line comment hits
(A) The plugins do not actually have any particular philosophy. They act as facilitators for different lists which certainly have their own.
(B) The creators of the plugins' philosophies (which again, aren't actually in the plugin - usually you have to look into the creator) tend to be varied, and several of them (notably the best ones) do promote supporting content creators, either directly or via whitelist
(C) You can always control your adblocker, and many users (especially those who care about a site, are interested in related content, or so on) do disable it for their favorite sites. The extensions (that I've used, anyways) specifically account for this and remember whitelisted sites.
If your site is significantly suffering because of adblocking and you've mentioned your concerns to users, adblockers are not your problem, your users are. There's no fix for resource leeches.
You're mostly arguing semantics. I believe the default options -- that most users never adjust -- are very aggressive for nearly all major ad blockers, blocking all ads possible as well as adblock detection scripts. We can call that something other than a philosophy if you wish, but that stuff matters..
My sites are not suffering significantly at all due to ad blocking, but some peers say it's a problem. It's a bummer, though, that we don't even have an opportunity to show adblock users that our ads are relevant and not too obnoxious. The filter list author has made that decision for them, and it's almost always "block every ad."
If you are already directly selling the ads, why not host them on your own domain? Then they won't be blocked automatically. If you still see people going out of their way to add site-specific rules to their ad blocker, the ads probably weren't as relevant or unintrusive as you thought.
Troy Hunt wrote about his experience with self-hosted ads a while ago [1]. Basically, he added a as-non-intrusive-as-possible "banner" (if you can even call it that) at the top of the content. Ad blockers blocked it. He changed the markup to avoid being caught by a false positive. Ad blockers (Adblock Plus with EasyList in this case) blocked it again.
I made similar experiences in the past, to the point where our API broke because we had the audacity to call one of our API endpoints "metric" (for a metrics service), which got caught by one of the over-zealous regexes of EasyList.
