Basic Attention Token
basicattentiontoken.org
basicattentiontoken.org
They also list that 600 million devices are actively blocking ads, meaning these people went out of their way to not see ads. Now you want them to switch browser just so that they can see ads - are they on crack?
BAT? BATshit crazy...
Having said that however, if there was an option in Firefox to enable this, I may consider it if all other ads were still blocked.
What's the alternative? If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
The users have heard that too often. We're all out of trust to give.
If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
If every web user blocked all ads, content creators wouldn't be able to get any revenue from ads. There are other ways of getting revenue.
What's the alternative?
There's what @libeclipse said in his comment: if you somehow make this tech work in popular browsers, then there are people who might be willing to try it and maybe it becomes the accepted solution.
Other than that? Paid content. Yes, that makes it harder for content creators to get money and harder for content consumers to get free content. So what?
Are we really so convinced that everyone who creates anything deserves to be paid for it? Do we really need so much free content? More specifically, are we all so convinced of these two things that we're okay with giving up our rights on how to render web content on our own computers? 'Cause that's what it boils down to in the end.
I have a collaborate writing forum for young teens which don't have credit cards.
Maybe you think my forum shouldn't exist because it depends on ads, but as someone who grew up on a similar writing forum and developed my love for writing at a young age, I'd disagree.
The answer to your question is simple: it doesn't matter. Replace "content creator" with a more general "service provider" and my point remains exactly the same. There is no good reason why we need to defend ads, specifically, as a business model, other than "it's already in place". And while "being in place" is a rather strong force, more and more people are using ad blockers. I would consider that a pretty clear indicator that we need a better system.
There's one last thing I would like to clarify about my argument: no matter what systems we have or lack, the question is always who cares for something enough to pay for all of part of it. Ads try to take that question away, but they don't -- they merely make it seem like they do. But even if we didn't have the ads, there are always ways to shift the burden of payment away from the totality of the consumers.
For example, the service could be sustained through a donation drive. Wikipedia comes to mind right away, but so does the PTSA of the public school my son goes to. Another source of funding might be the service provider: there are people out there so passionate about what they do, that they'll pay the costs out of their own pockets. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everyone should depend on altruism, but it's also an option that doesn't get brought up enough.
There is such a thing as artificially inflated demand, which can be a problem, but I don't think it's likely that all advertising falls in that bucket.
I understand the desire to make money flow towards the content creators. I understand the desire for free content. I understand that the ads seem to "solve" both of those problems. I just don't understand why people think it's better to keep investing our time and energy into trying to save ads instead of looking for alternative solutions.
So why ads?
But yeah, personally I'd prefer a different system. I really like the idea of micropayments, but I don't know how that would look exactly.
True and more than this, advertising could be a service to me.
Advertising has multiple functions. One is helping with discovery. Users have some problem they don't know someone is solving. Another is branding. Shove brand recognition down people's throats until they automatically reach for your product.
I use friends to discover new products and services, because they provide reliable suggestions and don't water down their reputation through brand building.
I was excited for the targeted ads movement, because of what it promised. I really want a recommendation engine that is smarter than everyone I know. That would be amazing. It's a giant world with lots of startups and makers, surely my monkey brain cannot possibly know enough people to track every one of these. So I'm ready, have the grand AI tell me what people are making and how it helps my life!
In practice, they didn't deliver. Targeted ads are like an idiot savant. I basically just get recommendations to buy whatever I just bought, even if that makes no sense. (You just bought a blender, why don't you buy two of them so you can have one on every counter!?)
It's the simplest logic that would work on a plurality of sales. Most people who buy paper towels later buy them again. Ok, new rule: people like buying what they just bought. No exceptions, logic done.
I know incredibly smart people work on targeted ads, so I can't imagine they're missing this. My best guess is that there's too much low hanging fruit to improve a recommendation engine, or that the other lucrative aspects of advertising (brand building) chase out any funding or development for a 100% user-interest focused ad-engine, er, recommendation-engine for products.
So I actually respect the impossible bar that BAT sets for itself. If we have an advertising system people will actually install a browser for (or pay a monthly subscription for), then we will have fixed advertising. Not before.
It's a good finish line. Whoever can cross it definitely wins.
Whenever someone argues that less content will be produced, I always feel that it just won't be enough reduction for consumers to care. Things like Youtube grew in a climate where being a full-time Youtuber was not possible like it is today.
The only down side I remember is that we only had one Mr. T fan page.
It's a great idea! I completely agree. If advertising on the web respected users and users could trust that they would be respected, users wouldn't feel the need to block ads.
With that said, it's possible that perhaps users have trusted this precise pitch in the past. In general, money has proven corrosive to respect, and ad-blockers stage a comeback as a result.
> What's the alternative? If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
Make something good enough that I want to pay for it. This isn't ridiculous or a pipe dream. I pay for The Economist and Nautilus because they are worth it to me.
I don't really see the need to trust advertisers in Brave's scheme here, either. You need to trust the browser to judge which ads are acceptable, but alternatively you need to trust the ad blocker to know which things are ads.
I understand the problem. I just think that this is a stupid solution. As for content creators getting revenue, how about selling it? Like we used to do?
Straight up selling content isn't the solution either, IMO. It would require a huge cultural shift in what the web is, which I don't think people are willing to do. More problematically, if all web content was a la carte paid for, that would lock out lower income people from a ton of information, which seems like a step backward, socially.
Right here is where it all falls apart. There _is no_ way.
Since they are on a blockchain, I believe they could solve this by including the user in the selling of the attention.
I, for one, would like to have some chump change in my browser, so that I can open easily some paywalls.
Say they get the NYT to accept ETH as payment; NYT would have its revenue tied to users adopting this attention selling. And the NYT would advertise this technology freely.
This is how micro-transactions can be bootstrapped.
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After all the ads are using my connection, my pixels, my eyes, my neurons. Why not include me in the transaction?
All of the problems they list hurt Google.
Publisher: you are extorting me into using your platform by blocking my partners' ads.
Advertiser: you are extorting me into using your platform by blocking my ads.
The problem with this is that it doesn't influence incentives in the right way. If your goal is to replace advertising entirely, there needs to be something to replace it. If your goal is to make advertising better, you need to reward the "good ads" (whatever that means) by selectively showing them.
If you just don't care and don't want to see ads, I guess you're in the majority but you're not really helping anything.
It's not my job to help anything. Other people's revenue models are not my problem.
For everyone involved in the ecosystem, Brandon Eich and Brave are starting out on the wrong foot.
1. The brave browser by default blocks ads and tracking software.
2. That advertisements are opt-in only in the brave browser.
So while this is a subtle advertisement for the Brave Browser[0], I think this is also a clean separation from the browser in attempt to create a new form of advertising. While obviously those defaults can change, I'd imagine the reason for the clean separation between the BAT and the Brave Browser is because users would be significantly more hesitant to join if the "goal" of the browser was an alternative for of advertising. On that merit I would evaluate the browser separately from this idea.
Ignoring the integration with the Brave browser though, one issue for this is that this doesn't solve the fundamental problem of a company that might have a boring product, that wants to advertise and is willing to pay for it. Google will take your money, and show your ads to the relevant market. People click on those ads, and drive engagement to the company. Most companies don't have exciting enough products to be able to drive engagement with simply the "product".
Another issue is that if the BAT tokens are generated from users attention and the quality of the ads, and NO user information is stored like is claimed here, then there would engagement would most likely be significantly less than with other advertisers, as the advertising market is then expanded to all people, rather than the demographic the company is trying to hit. This would mean that whatever monetization form Brave comes up with is going to have to be a lot cheaper than what Google is charging, because I can almost guarantee engagement suffer drastically.
Finally, as a quick test, I don't even see the browser succeeding on the basis of blocking "all" ad content, as it doesn't even block Facebook ads with the "block all ads" setting checked[1]. I'd imagine because Facebook sends their ads along with the actual page content, which I'd also imagine most other ad companies would figure out a way to do if Brave becomes more successful.
I use Swipe Pro on my android, and it blocks those just fine
Also, what happens to actual real ads? Are they blocked and replaces by their own ads by the browser?
>Also, what happens to actual real ads? Are they blocked and replaces by their own ads by the browser?
Not sure. Ideally, the content provider is on-board with the scheme and will be compensated by "tokens" (which have monetary value) based on Ethereum.
It's all actually quite clever, but faces obvious "chicken-and-egg" problems.
I don't really think Brave's solution here is fully-baked, but the idea of replacing all those third-party trackers with one that's on-device and (presumably) I can have some degree of control over sounds like a step in the right direction.
I know that advertisers prefer this, but I'm not quite convinced that most users do.
The most polarizing example of this is, of course, remarketing.
That said, if advertisers simply respected "do not track", we could see for ourselves how true that is.
What difference does it make to me, that I see a bunch of ads for Coke, versus Pepsi? Surely, I'm well aware that sugary drinks exist. The ad isn't notifying me of a particular sale, or a discount. All it does, is remind me that sugar water exists, and that I should buy their brand of sugar water.
This is hardly a gain for me, or society. It's certainly a gain for Coke...
I don't really like ads either, all I'm saying is that it's simplistic to say ads have zero value to people. If that were true there would be no reason to advertise anyway.
There is a benefit to certain highly recognized brands. Dyson makes great vacuums (Or, it used to - now people only think it does.) Toyota makes reliable vehicles. Coke vs Pepsi, though? It's sugar water. It's a commodity, with no differentiation in quality. It is quite literally, up to personal preference.
> I'm saying is that it's simplistic to say ads have zero value to people.
There are plenty of reasons to engage in zero-sum, or even negative-sum activities. Even if advertising as a whole adds value (Which I think is too close to call), a very large part of it does not.
Essentially yes[1], which is why I'll never be onboard with Brave or any solutions that rely on it.
The real solution is to find a reasonable compromise that balances everyone's interest, and that's what Brave is trying to do.
No, not really; people just need to make a living somehow. It's convenient when that can happen as a result of creative activity, but the vast majority of people producing content do so because they want to, not because they are getting paid for it.
(From replies to your comment I feel the need to add: The first thing to do before jumping to "Everyone is stupid except me" (H. Simpson) is read carefully and consider what is proposed on its face. ;-)
Baseline Brave doesn't do anything with ads except block third party trackers and ads. We offer opt-in fingerprinting protection and script blocking too, and we will work to enable fingerprint defense by default. This baseline won't change, it's the starting condition for opt-in methods which users may choose to help support sites.
The first and cleanest opt-in method is already in Brave on laptop/desktop. Go to Preferences / Payments to fund a wallet so you can auto-micro-donate to your top sites as calculated locally (no remote tracking) over 30 days of uptime. At the end of the 30 day period, using VPN for IP address masking and a ZKP based on https://anonize.org/, Brave sends zero-knowlege proof "votes" for the candidate sites you browsed. You can adjust or turn off any sites you don't wish to support.
We're building on this beta "Brave Payments" system to efface bitcoin from users' view, and eventually from publishers. But right now publishers who have money due to them can come and get it by verifying they own their domain (akin to the ACME challenge-response protocol pioneered by LetsEncrypt), at https://publishers.brave.com/.
We don't expect donors to make up for lost ad revenue at scale, which is why we are working on basicattentiontoken.org and an opt-in client component to mine your data on-device, no signals out. Note your data includes you queries to search engines -- these belong to you and they form hot intent signals from you should benefit materially, and not just in quality of results -- in all economics based on search plus browsing.
Brave is all auditable open source, all non-baseline browser options are opt-in. Sorry, gotta repeat given the tendency to miss or misstate this.
The opt-in M/L component can predict a set of keywords to match against an offer and ad catalog downloaded to each opted-in user's device. That catalog has only edge-cache URLs with small keyword sets per URL.
Upon finding the best match at the best time, you'll get an offer or ad. We are planning to let you choose several channels: fullscreen video, chatbot on a messaging app, even one per day email (some people prefer this). Only with publishers who partner with us and want to see how this system can work on their third party ad slots in which we block ads will we, with user opt-in as well as publisher, see if we can fill empty space.
Instead of shotgunning thousands of websites to try to reach users who are poorly tracked by today's cookies, user-ids on mobile, and fingerprinting, we believe a private promotion system can show much better performance in all dimensions (opt-in user happiness, data and battery use, conversion for ad buyers, yield for ad space sellers if they are in the loop).
As Joe Marchese (TrueX, now Fox -- Joe encourages his staff to install and use adblockers) has pointed out, today's digital ad system wastes money and loses users by spray-and-pray tactics, instead of finding the right place and time to give you marketing information you might actually want. Again and I'll stop repeating it, this is all only if you opt in. But, if you do, then you get a revenue share in BATs. Brave's cut will be same or smaller, that's a brand promise. If the ad places in a channel you control (fullscreen video, chatbot, email), the bulk of the revenue will go to you.
Anyway, that's what we are building.
All BAT-certified apps (BAT is for more than Brave, e.g., other browsers, "readers", games, messaging apps), will have to conform to rules we are prototyping in Brave. Conformance will be built into the cryptographic protocols, plus rate-limits and other defenses, so cheating and fraud will be very hard. More on this over time as we launch BAT and build out the full prototype in Brave.
He mentions that tracking and adblocking are wasteful, but I view them as a beautiful example of how the market implicitly equilibrates itself to provide the "right amount" of advertising.
I like Brave, but it seems to me that they are over-engineering a non-problem.
Do you think that it might be impossible to get control over all of that information?
It is possible, and it is happening.
Not saying it's a good answer, but it's right there on the page.
This is an obvious use case for 1) some kind of database/book entry system, centralized, if you don't care about anonymity or 2) blinded Chaumian tokens, if you want anonymity (which has security/risk model costs)
Also, rewarding users with "premium content" or let them "donate it to publsihers" doesn't seem too realistic.
I like the idea but I see some major hurdles before this takes off.
The understatement of the century...
Reverse engineering the protocol would probably allow a very resource efficient exploit, but it's far from the only point where the protocol can be corrupted by a user with fraudulent intent.
In related news, I've figured out a way to totally eliminate automated email spam. It involves replacing SMTP with a new protocol that doesn't allow messages to be delivered unless the sending server cryptographically confirms that a real human pushed the "send" button.
And then instances of Brave and any other browser
implementing this protocol could easily be
cryptographically confirmed to the ad network.
Otherwise, the botnets will all be running code that says "YEP DEFINITELY LEGIT U CAN TRUST ME" on every request.
> The Brave browser knows where users spend their time
Well, which one is it?