Advertisements are harmful to every layer of society, mostly because they prey on you to instill desires that you probably wouldn't have had on your own (it being the case that this is their entire added value proposition). They should not be tolerated, and the fact that they ever were is a travesty.
That being the case, any argument founded on "but advertisements" does not hold water.
It's not founded on "but advertisements" it's founded on "but paying for content". The fact that websites are developed by people (wages), hosted on infrastructure (hardware renting) and require countless other jobs is somehow magically forgotten in these discussions.
It's not up to me or anyone consuming content to help with figuring out the right way to pay for it. What is up to me is the choice to not be potentially exposed to malware any time I go to read the news.
While you may have a point, that point just doesn't matter within the context that we're talking about. Making companies money is not my responsibility.
> Consuming the content means agreeing to the premise that the content is paid for using ads.
It is in fact not this way, because the content arrives with or without the ads. In the EU EULAs (the dystopian construct that you'd expect to enforce that bit of lunacy) that purport to apply to content you have already accessed are not legally valid. Leaving the legal interpretation aside, me doing one thing doesn't mean consent for something else. Believing otherwise is both unethical and amoral, stances I don't hugely feel like interacting with.
> It is in fact not this way, because the content arrives with or without the ads
But that's simply a technical implementation detail.
If the articles you read had first party ads or videos with embedded ads in them, that choice wouldn't exist like it already doesn't when you watch TV.
> Leaving the legal interpretation aside, me doing one thing doesn't mean consent for something else. Believing otherwise is both unethical and amoral, stances I don't hugely feel like interacting with.
Yes and you stealing content (consuming without paying for it) is somehow moral?
It's easy to find all kinds of free content, should it be music, movies or series but lets not kid ourselves in thinking that it is some great human right to have access to things we didn't pay for.
That being the case, any argument founded on "but advertisements" does not hold water.