I agree. It's just like any other kind of piracy. If the content isn't valuable enough to see with ads enabled, then the ethical answer is to not view the content at all.
It turns out to be the other way around: the site owner claims that the ads Google served up were of such low quality that they "polluted" the content of the site:
"For about R20,000 a year, it isn’t worth it to pollute our content with get-rich-quick adverts featuring Patrice Motsepe, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (see image at top of article)."
Moreover, the author states in the comments that their non-profit is sustained by donations, not by ads. If someone had visited this site with an ad-blocker turned on before the author stopped using Google ads, it would have improved the content (by the author's own stated standards) without endangering the site's source of funding.
Granted this may be a special case. But I think special cases are often worth the read, or at least not "just like any other kind."
I read newspapers without looking at the ads. I use highways and public transportation without looking at the billboards. I don't see how it's any different.
I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at home.
There is a big difference between print and web: by the time you rip the ads out of the newspaper you have already made it to the ad statistics (“our newspaper sells X copies daily”). On the other hand, with an ad blocker an ad load is never recorded. In the first case, the publisher still makes money, in the second he doesn’t.
Along with several other factors, this is what makes advertising online more valuable, as far as I can tell. Online ads can be far better quantified, in terms of impact, can appeal more to their target audience, can more easily provide a service alongside their advertising content, etc. Advertisers were given a magic wand, but decided to break it over their collective knee and carrying on waving their empty hands about instead.
In the first case you are also screwing the advertising entity for the gain of the publisher, in the second case you are not pretending to see ads to profit for someone in the ecosystem on the expense of someone else.
Unless your friend asks you to cut ads out of their newspaper. Ad blockers operate with explicit permission, so it's not as if anyone who wants to view ads is being deprived.
