A lot’s being said around the Daring-Fireball region of the Web about the failure of most sites these days (with a few notable exceptions like the Boston Globe redesign) to make content reader- rather than advertiser-friendly.

I have a proposal:

A consortium of pro-reader organizations should get together to distribute and promote a customized adblocking plugin that works exactly like Adblock / Adblock Plus, but with one simple criteria: if the ration in size in bytes of content downloaded by your page vs. amount of text content exceeds a certain threshold, your ads are blocked by Adblock. If not, ads are shown.

Obviously it’d need some tweaking for exact thresholds, and you’d need a big install base to make an impact, but just imagine how hard now-hideous sites like Business Insider would work to fix their errant ways if 50% of their visitors had a setup like this.

(I can also think of later algorithm improvements as publishers try to sneak around things — for example, measure how many pixels above the first 400px+ wide text paragraph are made up of ads/nav/etc. and reward sites that give you the content as close to the top as possible. This starts to basically be a score like a PageRank — ReadabilityRank, let’s call it).