I actually find the Brave model bizarre. You get paid for viewing ads but you can't cash it out. So you have this model of virtual (useless) money moving between publishers and consumers at all times. And then you have centralization in both on-boarding publishers and also handling payments (Uphold) that provides single point of failure.
I wish Google Contributor[1] was more popular and covered more websites. I would gladly pay $15-$20 per month to not see ads and also not get tracked throughout the internet.