It's perfectly legitimate to get up and get a drink of water instead of watching commercials on broadcast TV, and it is equally legitimate to not view advertisements on websites that post advertisements.
I don't care that I'm an "asshole". When I show less technical people how to block advertisements, the first thing they usually say is, "thank you!" or "can I buy you a beer?". I never met one person (other than people in marketing) that have said, "No, I'd prefer to see advertisements over content".
On the other hand, I am aware that everyone's ethics are different, and I generally try to withhold judgment.
Your conscience can be clear, since you have the means to allow sites to fund themselves via advertising if they deal with ethical advertisers.
What I consider unethical is sites which track you across hundreds of internet sites while trying to figure out your previous URL history of sites it doesn't track all the while hiding behind the fine print saying what it does is legal.
Internet advertising is nothing like newspaper or magazine ads. Internet advertising has a tracking component built into it and that tracking component doesn't stop once you leave the site. It follows you forever.
Of course the content curators can use the same argument. They have every right to restrict content access to whoever they want but ultimately that wouldn't be profitable so they have to very liberal with their access permissions and chalk it down as a cost of doing business.
That is unarguable.
However, very few here will be man/woman enough to admit they're an asshole and don't care about the finances of the website. It's the true reason why we use Adblock and pirate others' IP.
Being an asshole are the sites that allow unethical tracking and pass around user private info from one ad network to the next. Take your weak argument elsewhere.
Site owners need to have some common sense when it comes to advertising
