Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue.
Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize.
How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network
It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a position to claim revenues of the ads they're seeing?
Depending on the answers to those questions, the addition of (2) could be worse for these publishers if it makes some users who otherwise would've (begrudgingly or otherwise) chosen option (0) feel morally justified in switching over to (2), converting their real (0)-derived revenues into unrealised (2)-derived theoretical revenues.
Unfortunately, that is likely not an optimally ethical reference state for the browser. Navigating with no ad blocker leaves the user open to all kinds of nasty tracking, auto-loading, and general trickery. When taken together that shady behavior can be seen by a reasonable person to outweigh the benefits of maximizing revenue for the user's favorite sites.
Case in point: if I want to open a pdf music score from IMSLP, IMSLP displays an ad with the prominent text "Download PDF" in it. If I follow the ad it eventually prompts me to install a Chrome extension. Do you think it's wise to install that extension?
In general I trust that IMSLP is an ethical site-- after all, they've spent a lot of effort to ensure that nobody downloads a score that is still under copyright in the country where the user is located. Did they forget to check a box to disallow misleading ads for their site? If there's no such checkbox "preferred network" is quite a euphemism and the correct/ethical reference state for browsers is with ublock origin installed.
Edit: just to be clear-- 2 could still be worse than 1 depending on how Brave browser behaves. But for most practical uses of the web by non-technical users, your 0 is almost always a worse ethical choice than 1.
Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
Ad-blocking in Brave (as it already exists in every other browser via plugins) is optional.
Brave ads (a paradigm which doesn't exist in any other browser) are optional.
You can disable both, enable both, or disable one and not the other. The choice is absolutely on the user and Brave isn't holding anything hostage.
You're still confusing who is at fault here.
I think that's why they went with a cryptocurrency for payment. Brave isn't a middleman, or at least there's no technical reason why they have to be. Users pay publishers directly, using tokens that they earn from Brave in exchange for viewing ads.
wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process
Are you saying that site owners should feel violated by folks installing ad-blockers (or using host files)?
Brave, however, positions itself as being good for creators with its rewards program. A user may be forgiven for thinking that this is actually better for creators: "Earn rewards and give back to your favorite Creators. Support your favorite sites with micropayments."
If Brave takes away revenue from the creators, and offers them a fraction of that revenue back, that's one thing. BUT you can't turn around and say that a creator accepting that fraction is "consent" to the whole program.
That's what I was saying.