Brave Inc. gets a lot of flack, some warranted, but their Basic Attention Token allows for exactly this. Users can add credit to their wallet by either consuming privacy-friendly ads or topping it up manually, which then gets distributed to the sites they visit in the proportion they choose, transparently in the background while they browse.

It is a shame that this feature gets lumped together with claims of crypto scams, and similar nonsense. Yet this is precisely the right model that could work at scale to eliminate the advertising middleman, and make the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for everyone.

It's frustrating that humans are stoichastic parrots and the minute you mention crypto they go into conniptions because the rails are basically there. It's not user friendly, but it's possible to build a system where you transfer $0.05 cents of crypto to someone as you scroll down a web page using a special browser.

Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators some of that money if and only if the creator realizes they have to sign up for Brave's cryptoshit. It's straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak is deserved.