The main issue with Brave's funding model is that it relies on consumer goodwill. While people might be willing to spend $0.02 to read a news article, they're less likely to allocate $10/month to funding online content creators "just because". There has to be some sort of incentive for most people to spend their money; if they can get the same experience for free, only a small minority will ever bother to pay.
So the question is, how do you provide consumers with such an incentive without charging for the content itself (as that can be problematic for the reason you mentioned), without offering "an ad-free experience" for paid users (as Brave blocks ads by default regardless of whether users pay or not), and without requiring users to incur the mental load of trying to decide whether the paid experience is worth it over the free one?
I often hit the free limit on say articles on New York Times and similar sites. After seeing the article title I am often interested enough to click on it to read it. But the count of free articles is full so I can't read the article. Now if it said "If you want to read this article there will be $0.50 charge in your next month's internet bill, I would probably go ahead and click and pay it in the next bill.
Problem is I don't want to open an account with just every possible newspaper and magazine on the web. What is needed is some common mechanism for most if not all content providers.
Maybe $0.50 is too much. Maybe $0.25 would be more like ok.
Your point about having a single account is correct, but the sheer amount of decisions when browsing the web would quickly become overwhelming.
Say that in an hour you browse two articles from the NYT, one from the WSJ, five Wikipedia pages, one click on a BuzzFeed listicle, and one blog post from Joe's blog.
Is the NYT article worth $0.50? $0.25? What about the WSJ one? And surely Wikipedia is worth as much as a NYT article. But the BuzzFeed one is definitely worth less. Maybe $0.05? It was moderately entertaining after all. And what about Joe's blog?
Having to do dozens of these micro decisions per hour is exhausting, and is the whole point behind having a system that allocates funding automatically. It's not optimal, but it avoids decision fatigue.
I'n thinking that the content-provider obviously would set the price, I would decide whether to click if it is 25 or fifty cents.
I don'think it would be more exhausting than being in a bar and putting coins into the jukebox.
Automatic funding sounds interesting, was it explained in the article somewhere? Or is the point that we should use 100 million to develop a working automatic funding algorithm since no such thing exists yet?
So the question is, how do you provide consumers with such an incentive without charging for the content itself (as that can be problematic for the reason you mentioned), without offering "an ad-free experience" for paid users (as Brave blocks ads by default regardless of whether users pay or not), and without requiring users to incur the mental load of trying to decide whether the paid experience is worth it over the free one?
A difficult problem to say the least.