If they don't want the traffic they are more than welcome to put it behind a paywall.
All that being said, I'm not sure how me seeing the ads helps them as I never click on them anyways, but I chalk that up to their business issue. I do not necessarily believe that just because they don't provide their content in a form/implicit contract that I wish to participate in, that I am still entitled to consume that content. A prime example for myself is EA Games. I disagree with a lot of their publishing practices and business decisions, but that doesn't mean I play all their games as pirated versions anyways, I simply abstain. Consuming the content by skirting this implied contract only results in this arms race you see in games, online content, and just about any other form of media. It's a competition between users wanting money-free content and publishers wanting to control exactly how their media is distributed and paid for. I don't think either side in this fight is right, but by participating on one side it eggs the other side on.
To be fair, the current anti-anti-adblockers like anti-adblock killer could defeat such a measure as is. Short of rendering their page to an image with ads builtin, there's not much you can do if someone's willing to replace JS.
What do you have against a good old fashioned cat and mouse game?
As it is right now, we are disincentivizing people from participating in a system that actually has a chance of surviving. Without compensation in some form, higher-tier journalism can't survive, and I for one don't think a world where all news comes from amateur bloggers is a better one.
The only way the model is going to change is if everyone adopts ad blockers and anti-anti solutions. And that's not going to happen. So I've got to deal with what we realistically have until someone comes up with this mythical better model and makes it work.
I can't change the model, but I can change what my computer does about it.
Wait, I don't get this "business issue". If you really never click the ads, you're ultimately not making anyone any money either. In fact, if you think ad-blocking is bad, merely never clicking on them is even more toxic to that industry. And I don't mean bandwidth. Because now it's the businesses paying to uselessly show you ads who are paying for your free content.
How is that better? You're still consuming your content for free (which is a terrible thing :P), except you're now also voluntarily punishing yourself with advertisements you don't care about that do nobody any favours. Of course you're free to believe that makes up for it, or something (not judging, they used to base entire religions around the concept).
I find it a bit hard to reconcile chalking up never-clicking-ads as their business issue, and simply not downloading and displaying the ads at all (thus also never clicking them) as a user problem.
They could forbid JavaScript, require simple URLs, and flow their content around well-defined and crafted ad locations. Their site would load quickly, the ads would still attend to the image they intend to project to the reader. Metrics on such ads wouldn't require third party JavaScript to monitor.
None of their readers would be subject to malware. Reader and provider would not be an antagonistic relationship.
They could do all of these things. They seem to have chosen another path, and made the choice for their readers--those they've kept--at the same time.
In short, for most people, a paywall is a much stronger negative than ads, so it's not an obvious why somebody who wants to use ads should just use a paywall.