Rather than whitelisting specific advertisers, why not come up with some acceptably non-annoying ad templates and tell the filter to let through things that match the template? Advertisers can just fill in the template and they'll know their ads will be shown. Make the template invisible if there's no ad blocker.
I think this might be the ultimate solution to the online advertising issue: the advertisers provide abstract content and the users decide if and how they want to look at it.
Sounds like an idea. The security principle of "enumerating the good" rather than "enumerating the bad" is an old one. You could define an HTML subset that would be acceptable, perhaps putting total size limits on certain things. That approach would also have effect of keeping the decision of what's acceptable unbiased.
There are size-limits on ads. Actually there have always (read: for the last 10+ years) been limits. Also, ad servers are usually rigorously tested with regards to performance, speed etc.
Not all sites enforce these limits, but major publishers are very aware of users' interests.
The problem is that if you visit an average website, there will probably be 20+ servers involved in serving the page, the javascripts, analytics, ads, etc.
One of those systems occasionally underperforms, which would not be a problem if everything but the main content was simply loaded asynchronously, possibly in the order of importance a website owner attaches to each content type.
I think this might be the ultimate solution to the online advertising issue: the advertisers provide abstract content and the users decide if and how they want to look at it.