It's a perfectly reasonable solution for those who are okay with it. You need to pay with something - either with your privacy, your attention, your money, or your electricity/idle CPU cycles.

Ad blockers eliminate paying with attention, and put a big squeeze on paying with privacy. Which makes the leftover choices of money or power quite reasonable.

What site uses the money or power for is nobody's business. Would you not pay journalists if you found out they like losing money on pyramid schemes?