You can direct revenue from advertisers to users and if you put it on a truly decentralized blockchain you can also prevent censorship as well as have verifiable privacy related features.
Advertising revenue is not sufficient to pay the users. We've documented this so many times, it is really ridiculous that I've had to repeat this dozens of times. I was the first person to point this out several months ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebookYou could pay a few curators or authors from ad revenue, if the other users don't expect to get paid. But then what is your onboarding paradigm to bring in the masses?
Yes, very interesting, I've looked at various user values before too. It would seem a US user is worth about $50 a year. I guess you could probably up that to $100-200 a year, depending on your level of activity and if you opted in for and actively consumed some targeted advertising. In addition to increased privacy, low/no censorship that might be enough to attract a reasonable amount of Facebook users who currently earning zero.
However I agree there is no model where paying for the type of content you see on Reddit and now Steem makes sense because we are talking minuscule amounts when you divide their revenue among the total content even when weighted to the most popular. (Reddit is actually still in the red I think, makes less revenue than it costs to cover running expenses, never mind paying users.)