Regarding why Unthinkingbit rewards writers - I understand there is a project to develop online devcoin advertising. The idea being that the advertising revenue will then be added to the coins yield from mining - so that even though the number of share lines is increasing, the pot as a whole is growing too and not limited to what the miners produce.

Advertising has to be attached to content, hence the content development. However advertisers need eyeballs - they won't pay to advertise on a page no-one reads. Unthinkingbit has tried to address this with the marketing share - but that's limited to a few places. There is no bonus for a link from reddit for instance.

The simplest way is to switch to writing shares based on visitors. By definition if you have readers you have been doing some promotion. Writers of fantasy and fan fiction can promote on those dedicated forums. Article writers can try to get their pages ranked on Google, to get search traffic, and so on.

I guess there's no hurry to change the share model because the advertising network hasn't been developed yet. But the issue of visitors will become an issue once it does.