Perhaps. They are losing people like me though. I will never pay for a subscription to read a website and I will continue using adblockers to get rid of annoying ads.
But they could still profit from me. There are less annoying ways to monetize which I might accept.
For example affiliate links to buy products I am interested in (books, video games, gadgets). I'd be willing to pay % extra for some nice product in order a fund a website which pointed me to it. Or extra traffic I'd refer to their site.
There's no way that affiliate links can pay the bills for publishers; numbers don't ad up (otherwise everyone would do it, and no one does -- well, actually, there's extremely limited situations where it works in some consumer corners, but those situations are limited and the total amount of revenue is also very limited). And how much extra traffic are you really going to refer? Ads are sold on the thousand -- $X per thousand (consumer can be cents up to maybe $8, B2B much higher). So even if you referred 200 people that's not even worth any effort. Unfortunately, if you're not going buy a subscription, register for a paper or click on an ad, you're probably not worth anything to the site anyhow.
But they would not make any money via ads from me anyways. I never click ads unless I do it accidentally by mis-clicking. So even with disabled adblocker I'd just lower their CPC (cost per click). So it costs them nothing to let me read their website with adblocker and there a tiny possible upside from me referring more traffic to them.
Either way I assume people like me are a fast growing part of millennial population so their business model based on ads is doomed to fail anyways.
Click throughs aren't necessary for advertising to work. A lot of it is to prime your subconscious, or strengthen associations. This is why Coca Cola doesn't care if you click through. Same with car companies. When most Americans think of soda, they think of coke. If you prime their subconscious to associate soda positively with thirst, and soda is similarly associated with Coke, you've got them.
I don't understand the distinction between intentionally overpaying for products to benefit a website and just paying the website directly. Also, not all websites can (or should) talk about products.
But they could still profit from me. There are less annoying ways to monetize which I might accept.
For example affiliate links to buy products I am interested in (books, video games, gadgets). I'd be willing to pay % extra for some nice product in order a fund a website which pointed me to it. Or extra traffic I'd refer to their site.