Yes - and that's the point. I wasn't being sarcastic in my comment of being courteous. I have three options. Ignore their plea, disable my adblock for them, or don't visit at all. They expect me to choose option 2. Out of the other two options, I choose the more courteous one.

All it is doing is slowing their death. News which doesn't get consumed will die out.

I'm of the opinion that ad-based business models on the internet will not work much longer. I'm of the opinion that only three business models will survive the next decade:

1) Collecting and selling user data in bulk (Massive sites that have access to said data)

2) Paywalls (Most sites)

3) Donations (minority, tight knit communities)

Will the web be worse off for it? Potentially. But I see ads as extremely harmful to people and not something to be tolerated regardless of the reason. From the subtle control over peoples' psyche, serving malware, or even being straight up scams... I don't see advertisements as moral and think the world would be better off without them.

which is great. the idea is not to do them a bad turn, it's just to partition them off into a "doesn't belong on my internet" bin and then let them go their own way.