I'm curious as to people's opinions about this:
I read frequently and post occasionally on a hobby-related Internet discussion board. It is run as a sort of public service by a couple of fellows who are active in that hobby themselves. They have a "donate here by Paypal" button on their site, and the also have top and side banner ads to help pay their Internet costs. They have said that their site is non-profit, that they end up chipping in a bit themselves most months to meet their costs.
Earlier this week I read an article about a service called Privacy Badger from the Electronic Freedom Foundation. It is NOT an ad blocker (the article said), instead it is an intrusive tracking cookie blocker. I decided to try the Chrome extension for Privacy Badger, to keep Internet advertisers from tracking me across the Internet.
Well, as soon as I added Privacy Badger, I noticed that the ads on the top and side of the hobby board's pages appeared grayed-out, and Privacy Badger said that it was protecting me from those advertisers' intrusive tracking cookies.
That's good, I guess, but doesn't it also mean that the fellows who run the hobby board are not getting the fraction of a penny that they would have gotten by me viewing the ads on that page? Is that "rude" of me, to visit their website but keep them from getting the ad revenue from my visit?