Mozilla is prototyping a content micropayment system tentatively called "Subscribe2Web". Here is a video presenting the ideas behind the project:
subscribe2web doesn't yet seem to solve what to me is the key part of the problem: in order for me to pay to opt out of ads, i still have to link my payment information to someone with a relationship to mozilla or some one else, and enable them to track what i read in order to distribute the funds. that's not necessarily better than google analytics and google ads...it's just different. and when it gets baked into the browser by default, it's potentially even more problematic than the status quo in certain ways.
This is even less than I had estimated. I need to dig into this number further.
Thanks for the link. This issue is a project of mine and it helps me a lot.