What's your take on this thought experiment:
Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"
Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.
Do you take one?
Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:
Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.
Do you skip the ads?
This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.
I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.
If a website put up an "ad-wall" (click to view!), I would not try to bypass it. Instead, they want the experience to be friction-less, subtle, (or, alternatively, overwhelming and surprising) so I don't quite notice the ad is there, or can't click away fast enough to avoid being influenced by it.
That is malicious by any reasonable definition. They are trying to impose something on me without making it explicit. Shielding myself from such a thing is ethical. With your pennies and apples example, they are not imposing anything on me, they're not performing a bait and switch. We can both engage within the rules established on the sign.