Reading this article brings back memories. There have been "watch ads for coins" businesses before. They all failed for reasons that were clear to everybody except their investors. Looks like there is a fresh batch of naive investors. These days you need to throw in a blockchain to get the investments though.
You're right that it doesn't make any sense. The problem is that advertisers don't care about views per se. They care about who is viewing their ads. And almost axiomatically, people who choose to look at ads for money are not the people advertisers want to target.
One of the great "watch ads for money" stories from the dotcom era was AllAdvantage. They were set to have a blockbuster IPO when Fortune magazine ran a story on them entitled "Meet the Dumbest Dotcom in the World," and that pretty much killed it.
Once upon a time there was a Spedia with their browser plugin which tracked, IIRC, what ads you've seen and when. You had to see a new ad every 60 seconds otherwise you wouldn't get paid.
