In an office in Tel Aviv in Israel a team of 25 is working on a program that could wreak havoc on the online advertising industry.

As the proportion of worldwide internet use shifts dramatically to mobile devices, Roi Carthy's team is pitching a service it claims can block advertising across entire mobile networks.

Carthy is chief marketing officer at Shine Technologies, an ad blocking start-up that allows network operators to block ads before they even reach customers' phones. He says he has been talking with telecommunications companies from around the world, including Australia, about using Shine's services.

"We block everything that's third party display. The majority of the ad-pollution that nobody particularly likes or has grown to disdain – that's the stuff we block," Carthy says.

"Where we come from there's a very simple premise, we believe that a consumer has a right to block ads, it's as simple as that. What that consumer finds abusive is up to them, but we provide them with that right." Shine does not block native advertising or advertorial content.

While ad blocking is unlikely to be added to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights anytime soon, there's a strong recognition within the publishing industry that the adoption of ad blockers by individuals has skyrocketed and the only way to slow that is to improve the standard of digital ads.

Not all digital advertising is as invasive as pop out ads and autoplay videos selling you something you probably don't want. But much of it tracks users, uses up valuable data and causes pages to load slower.

So it's no surprise that consumers are increasingly turning to ad blockers, which are estimated to have cost publishers close to $US22 billion ($30 billion) last year, according to PageFair, and their use increased by 41 per cent in the 12 months to June 2015.

Ad blockers do exactly what it says on the label – they stop ads from loading when their host websites are opened. They have been available to download to phones or other computers for several years.

But for many it was Apple's decision to allow third party ad blockers on its iOS mobile operating system in September – and thus onto potentially hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads, where they'd previously been unavailable – that brought them to the fore.

Without ad revenue many websites and publishers would struggle to pay staff to create the content that users want to view, making this for some publishers a question of their very survival.

Online content viewing skew

So as the way people view online content skews sharply away from desktop to mobile devices where processing speeds are slower and data costs higher, exactly how to deal with ad blockers is a question exercising minds across the industry.

"For premium video, where we have people with ad blockers, we have detected that and said 'do you mind switching off your ad blocking because we're an ad-funded model'," says Nine Entertainment Co chief digital and marketing officer Alex Parsons.

"That's less about fighting ad block and more about educating consumers."

It's a classic consumer conundrum; free content with advertising or pay a subscription. News organisations for many years made their journalism available freely online and many are now turning to subscription models as audiences move away from print and advertising dollars shift to digital.

Online advertising works in two main ways. Locally run ads are presented, or served, by the company or publisher that owns the website and sells the space directly, allowing it to control what, where and when it appears. Third-party or remote ads servers are independent companies that offer to serve ads to any website which has signed up for the service.

Stuart McDonald, who runs travel planning website Travelfish, says users have become upset with being tracked, but many smaller publishers don't have the time or resources to have their own in house ad sales teams and turn to services like Google's AdSense to provide advertising for their websites.

McDonald says he initially approached his readers and removed as much of the tracking features from advertising as he could.

"We don't do pop up, the more user hostile type of advertising, and we've removed as much tracking as possible," he says.

However, advertisers pay less when they can't track users across the web – they can provide more targeted ads if they know the kinds of websites a user has shown interest in – and Travelfish's revenue from AdSense was cut in half, he says.

The entitlement generation

McDonald says that users want better, well-researched content, but aren't willing to look at ads. "It's the entitlement generation."

If some other solution can't be found McDonald sees a risk that two internets will be created: those high quality content sites behind paywalls and everything else.

For advertising technology firm Rubicon Project's general manager, Jay Stevens, there still needs to be a value exchange between the consumer and the creator of content, whether that be through their eyeballs via ads, or through their wallets.

"I think there's a bit of a naivety among consumers … there's a feeling that they should be able to get content for free," he says.

Stevens says publishers have been guilty of having too much advertising, which has slowed down pages and soaked up user data.

"The challenge that the world is facing is that display advertising, whether it's mobile, video or traditional display, is largely and increasingly being driven by data that helps the advertiser do a better job in providing a more relevant ad to that consumer."

At Germany-based Eyeo, creator of the AdBlock Plus software, which it claims has been downloaded more than 400 million times, the middle road between blocking all ads and none has been to create an acceptable ads criterion. But it has been a polarising move.

But Stevens says that is "extortion".

"The reality is they produce a piece of software, which essentially removes the capability for a publisher to pay the bills, and it's expensive to pay premium editorial journalists, fact checkers, photojournalists, editors.

"To run a media organisation isn't free."

However, going tit-for-tat trying to beat ad blocking software will only bring limited success, Stevens says. Instead he suggests a publishing model not dissimilar to Spotify – where users can opt for free music, but with ads, or pay for an ad-free experience.

Criteria for acceptable ads

Ben Williams, operations and communications manager at AdBlock Plus, says creating criteria for acceptable ads was the best way forward because it would improve the advertising experience, but still allow for the use of ads that fund much of the internet.

"Some ads can be better, there's a sea change in the ad industry, but it's going to take some time to get to a place where there are a majority of good ads out there," Williams says.

Websites and publishers can be added to AdBlock Plus's whitelist once their ads are deemed acceptable. The company generates much of its revenue by charging larger entities – about 10 per cent of those on the list, Williams says – to have AdBlock staff go through their website making sure ads are acceptable and adding them to the whitelist. The remaining majority of websites and publishers do not pay.

The fee AdBlock takes for whitelisting an ad pans out at about 30 per cent of the money the publisher would normally get when a user sees the acceptable ad.

Williams says AdBlock Plus is planning to give up control of the acceptable ads criteria to an independent panel.

Whether or not such a panel could influence the way ads are created and delivered is open to question. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that pretty much everyone in the online world – from advertisers, software developers and publishers to the billions of individuals on their phones, tablets and computers – will soon need to make a choice. And the battle to influence that choice is well underway.

In the first quarter of 2016, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia will begin a study to gauge consumer understanding of how advertising funds content. It will follow similar research in the United Kingdom, which showed that 61 per cent of people in Britain would rather see ads than pay for content.

The IAB is also rolling out its LEAN (Light, Encrypted, Ad Choice Supported and Non-Invasive) ads principles to improve the quality of advertising.

"Publishers have got to take control of the site experience," IAB Australia chief executive Alice Manners says.

Or they could just fight back with other technology.

Ben Barokas left Google in 2015 to establish Sourcepoint Technologies, which allows publishers to prevent consumers using ad blockers – blocking the ad blocker. But also, among other choices, Sourcepoint gives users to option of paying the publisher to get rid of ads.

"Solving this problem is about that transparent transaction and giving users choice and giving publishers choice," Barokas says.

"It's asking the user to opt in to an advertising experience, where that's the standard or customised advertising experience or a subscription service. Where you can customise your experience based on your willingness to pay with your attention or your wallet."

Barokas says that many mid and lower level publishers would be at risk during this transition to find a way through ad blocking, stating what ad blockers are doing is "unconscionable".

"I think you'll see in the very near term it's going to get much more aggressive and more content creators are going to create content locks," he says.

Indeed, in November Yahoo confirmed it stopped some of its users, who were using ad blockers, from accessing their Yahoo Mail, asking them to turn off the software to gain access. The company later said it was "testing" a new product experience.

"Nothing short of actually asking users to vote with pocket books, and vote with their eyes will actually solve these problems," Barakos says.