Is it easy to detect people who are using adblock and serve them nothing? Not that that is the best way to handle it but the OP does have a point. At least it would stop leaches. If you put content out for "free" because you make a few cents from advertising if they block the ads it's not much different than stealing.

I have never done this, but technically you could do this. The problem I see how to implement this in a way that can not easily be countered with new ad blocking tools.

For example, a year or so ago I saw that DuckDuckGo notices when you use ad blocking and very respectfully asks you to consider not blocking their ads.

A few months later, the ad blocking software that I use, added a feature to block those respectful messages too.

Note: I am not currently blocking ads on DDG

It's kind of a problem. If users should be allowed to choose not to view ads then content creators should be allowed to not serve that content.

To be clear, I am not against ad publishers taking this approach. I am just doubtful about how effective it will be.

no matter what the adblocker can always pretend to view the ad, this is not a fight advertisers can win.

Ad blockers should develop a way for sites to know if a user is using the ad blocker. It's not about advertisers winning it's about people that pay for hosting with the expectation they will make ad revenue from their content. I feel like ad blockers is pushing us towards the "comcast pay per channel" type internet.

The fact is a majority of sites need to make money from their content. So they can sell ads, or related products, or paid access or just beg like wikipedia but there has to be some potential to make money or a majority of sites cease to exist.

I guess the counterpoint to this is if the site can detect ad blockers than they could attempt to use methods the blockers can't pick up yet.