Yes, they probably should. It works in the retail world. Shop owners are usually happy to have non-paying customers in their store, and restaurant owners usually happy to have low-paying customers (i.e. they don't buy very much), to make sure their establishment "looks busy". Having a store or eatery with few or no customers is bad: it "looks dead" and can either scare away customers, or just not bring as many in. People are social creatures; when they see a lot of people in a place, they think that it must be popular for a reason, so having some customers brings in more customers, and some fraction of those customers will pay (or pay a lot more than the average), making the establishment profitable overall.
Internet publishers need to figure out a better business model if they one they have isn't profitable enough for them. Other businesses have long recognized that not all customers are equally profitable, and some aren't profitable at all, but they figured out how to make things work.
Until internet publishers reach that conclusion themselves, is it OK to force a different business model on them? To be clear, that "business model" is "I don't like the form of payment this business is asking for, so I'll take the merchandise for free instead."
When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.
If the store doesn't want to give merchandise away for free, then they should stop doing that. When I make an HTTP request, it's just that: a request. Their server can either respond with the page, or not (or a different page). It's my business what I do with the code that the server sends me.
>When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.
Poor analogy. These websites aren't actually selling you stuff, they're giving away stuff for free, and hoping you'll look at the ads.
If I go into a store that's handing out free samples along with a stack of paper advertisements to look at, and I take some samples and decline to take the ads (or I promptly drop the ads into the trash can), that's the store's problem, not mine. I have no obligation to look at their ads. It's the business's responsibility to come up with a workable business model.
Do you mind if i hide all this shit while bying stuff on Amazon?
I use about 5 non-commercial services which may show ads (don't know whether they do or not and not gonna disable adblocker to check). I would happily pay 10€-15€ per month for this services, if there would be good save annonymes payment service. I don't want to send my utility bill to paypal or give away my credit card number. Maybe crypto would be a possibility.
If, for a random example since it's the one coming to mind, Marco Arment runs with an ad blocker (which he almost certainly does because he developed an early one for iOS) do you want him linking your piece? Unless you are one of the biggest news sites, you probably do. You might even be happy even if he linked it entirely to savage it.
On the other hand, do you want me? Probably not, I don't have that much reach.
Problem is figuring out who you've got, and even whether they're likely to offer that.
You can still see cases where publishers choose to not show stuff to anyone, but that's an artifact of imperfect ability of the publisher to discern between customers that would pay and the customer's that wouldn't -- they don't want to make a mistake to disincentivize someone able to pay from paying. You can see when they try and allow access from FB shares for example.
This makes it completely different from asking actual people for free work: person's price of time is expensive and it's rarely useful to give it away.
However, it does appear impossible to criticize technical and/or business decisions without being accused of enslaving web developers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/choosingbeggars would enjoy discussing that proposition.