Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrendanEich | Hacker News Reader

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Admiral, your surname suits you.

Brave has not even started ad replacement, we will bring up micropayments first. When the ad revenue flows, with NI-ZKP based anonymous confirmation of ad impressions, we will share 55% directly with publishers according to user traffic and impressions. We give 15% to users, which by default will auto micropay for their top sites to be ad-free. We take the same share, 15%. Our partner in privacy-preserving ad matching, Sonobi, makes 15%.

To say that our aggregate 70% revenue share to websites goes "directly into Eich's pocket" is either to say something you guessed wrong about, in which case read our site docs and watch our GitHub; or it is a lie.

Ads may decline in favor of paywalls but I doubt they will go away. And we are building, and bootstrap-funding via the 15% revshare, user wallets into Brave, with anonymity. If paying for web content does take off at the expense of ads, Brave is in pole position with our micropayments system to lead and win this race.

I'm well aware your business strategy's oriented contrary to the advice, but Nick Szabo and Clay Shirky's arguments against micropayments are very solid and should be considered.

I'd suggest looking at a payment aggregating rather than disaggregating system. It's the direction publishing's been headed for about 400 years.

Of course, you might just be the exception as proves the rule. But I doubt it.

We aggregate payments to publishers. I recommend you read just the material at https://brave.com/ including the FAQ and blog posts.

We strive to remove all cognitive overhead rightly decried in explicit micropayment systems. Users get a 15% revshare by default. It is used to auto-micropay their top 20 sites up to low monthly maximum or user wallet balance, whichever is smaller -- again by default. (All parameters will be adjustable, but the defaults will be tuned to drain the wallet each month unless the user intervenes.)

Users get notified in time to revoke any micropayments they don't want to make, but otherwise they don't have to think or intervene.

Your first sentence is oddly phrased, never mind pretentious and wrong. Did you give me "advice" that I ignored? I think the shoe is on the other foot.

Thanks for the response. I'm looking over Brave's pages.

A monthly cap actually makes some sense. I'm strongly partial to the knowledge as a public good argument, and would see it paid out of some sort of a general fund somehow, though getting from here (piecemeal / advertising / gratis / occasional subscriptions) to there (centralised revenues collection, some sort of content rating / pricing differential, use-tracking for author/artist compensation) seems difficult.

Amazon are doing something vaguely interesting with an all-you-can-eat monthly subscription concept. I believe O'Reilly's Safari operates similarly.

My introductory paragraph was meant to convey that I thought I'd be suggesting something probably not entirely welcome as it goes rather against the concept I'd understood Brave was based about. It apparently did so poorly, and I may be wrong, I often am.

I'd commented in an earlier HN thread where Brave was announced, though suspect you hadn't seen that. I've written a bit on content syndication and issues of information goods and market economics (they play poorly) at https://dredmorbius.reddit.com/

I'm not active in the space though I've given it a lot of thought over the past few decades.

Thanks, I will read.

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