Personally, I hate ads, so I pay. I have digital subscriptions to the newspapers I read. I have YouTube Premium (because I spend an ungodly amount of time on that site).
But for people who want to do neither... what's your idea?
There are people who have been fed up by this because they remembered how the web was like in the late 90s, before social media pushes became the dominant experience. People have formulated ideas around the Small Web (https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/), or even opted out of the browser ecosystem entirely with Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) or keep the torch burning for Gopher (https://hackaday.com/2021/09/28/gopher-the-competing-standar...)
From there, it is also a short hop and skip away to folks working on local-first (https://localfirstweb.dev/), decentralization, collapse computing (https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html and http://collapseos.org/)
On the internet as a whole, I do mostly lurk, but I have my own website where I try to post meaningful, useful content. To me, that's enough to have paid my dues. If you never, ever post anything. Yeah, paying is fair, but so long as you contribute back, you've paid, IMHO.
This gets tricky only because the web isn't small anymore. Youtube, for hosting, should probably get a cut, yeah. But the majority? no. The ability to monetize something someone else made and wants to distribute for free? Also no. They, IMHO, abused their way to near monopoly on video distribution, so they shouldn't have that right.
Similarly, I won't pay for content when I'm creating my own and distributing it for free (Actually, to some cost to me) and without ads.
Saying "Well, then only consume other's free content" is a fair rebuttal, but there's a larger social/societal problem that incentives making paid content or using platforms like YouTube which will monetize content made by anyone even if the creator never sees a Penny: The dominance of those platforms has stifled innovation to the point of depriving them of a real choice. (Again, opinion. Don't sue me Google <3)
By using adblock, I'm willfully, intentionally hurting that perverse incentive system.
It's a similar vibe to the idea that piracy may be moral, if it disenticives overbearing DRM. I pay for things when the DRM is non-existant or non-invasive. I've chosen not to when it is. I've let companines know on their forums before that I'd love to buy their product, if only they didn't use iLok, or Denuvo, etc. I usually don't pirate though, I just find an alternative, even if I think they have the better product and would otherwise be willing to pay.
I actually agree with this viewpoint, it makes me think of Peter Serafinowicz's why I steal movies article https://gizmodo.com/why-i-steal-movies-even-ones-im-in-55394...
however - I'm not sure if Serafinowicz would think that some guy on the internet writing articles is actually contributing back in the same way he might feel if you were distributing your own short comedic videos.
You may be contributing in a distribution channel, but are you contributing in a media?
The same goes for authors etc. They may think other authors should get a free pass on buying their books, because they're contributing, but not think that someone writing fan fiction on the web should get a pass.
The same with musicians, I'm sure you get the point. An artist in some field might think you are contributing if you are producing work in their field and should be given a pass on paying (I certainly would) but posting some meaningful to you on the web might not pass the bar of what they consider a contribution.