In which Wired both gets and misses the point
They acknowledge that readers either want to view content without all the cruft, or are concerned about the fact that advertising is as much about tracking as about actually putting ads in front of your eyeballs.
They are moving to restrict articles from those who use ad blockers, with the promise to visitors that if they whitelist the site in their ad blockers they will only see "standard display advertising". Of course they don't say what "standard display advertising" actually means to them. I suspect it just means that they will choose to serve ads that are not visually intrusive (e.g. Popovers, popunders, interstitials etc), and fine, that can appeal to their first group of readers who only care about not having lots of rubbish shoved in their face while they are trying to read. The issue is that they specifically point out that some people are very uncomfortable with the amount of tracking that goes on by advertisers, nothing is said about choosing advertisers based on their privacy policies.
The second option that was presented to readers was to pay $1 per week to have no ads shown. I'm curious to know whether or not there will still be third party tracking served to customers who pay to remove ads.