Edit: And how is the locally gathered "attention" monitoring not exploitable by the people who get paid for the attention? Running a bunch of VMs that "pay attention" to the ad seems like a cheap thing to rig up.
Was very glad to see Brave pairing a browser with cryptocurrency (though I don't know how they will handle the scalability issues), and then very disappointed to see that it's not actually replacing ads, but instead encouraging users to watch them.
Without cryptocurrency, you'd need some way for a user to pay all websites they visit. Ads can go on any browser and be served from any company. Ad networks don't need to interoperate. But if a user is paying publishers, it's a huge hurdle to have to pay a new publisher payment processor every time you visit a new site. Sure, 70% might accept Google payments, but what about the rest of them? And what about the users who are not on Google's payment platform?
Not that cryptocurrency solves all these problems. It's still a hard thing to do. But I think it at least lowers the barrier.
wait so the users are going to need more than one kind of token? And they're going to need to open accounts on an exchange?
> Without cryptocurrency, you'd need some way for a user to pay all websites they visit. Ads can go on any browser and be served from any company. Ad networks don't need to interoperate. But if a user is paying publishers, it's a huge hurdle to have to pay a new publisher payment processor every time you visit a new site. Sure, 70% might accept Google payments, but what about the rest of them? And what about the users who are not on Google's payment platform?
Hold on, BAT is 1 kind of token. All the ad publishers need to integrate with the BAT. How is this different than having all ad publishers integrating with Google Token?
If there is a competing token, let's call it CAT, how is that different than the AppleToken competing with the Google Token, from the user's perspective?
Presumably you wouldn't want to be locked into a proprietary platform that can raise fees once it has an effective monopoly.
The developers don't control the price... It's a market between brave/publishers/users.
Are you saying Google's engineers would be able to affect the price? That possibility has no affect on the product's success. That's like saying Amazon engineers can go and change the price of items so we should replace Amazon with a blockchain.
Not Amazon engineers, but Amazon itself could raise fees if it attains a comfortable de facto monopoly.
Agreed. This is actually something the blockchain has that existing systems do not: censorship resistance. The ability to participate and not be shut down, fined, or jailed by the rule of law.
However, if you remove the need to be censorship resistant and assume that no one will use the ad publishing system for illegal activity, I'd be really curious to hear what you mean by "other monopolistic practices".
Soon you will be able set up your wallet to automatically convert the incoming tokens into whatever currency you want. Including tokens pegged to USD or any other asset.
1. It provides a default way of paying publishers without any action by the consumer (i.e. the see an ad if they don't set up a payment system)
2. It establish a price for viewing the content, (i.e. the price that an advertiser would pay to show you an ad)
For reason 1, I can see how it is necessary to have an advertising option as a default to get the ecosystem rolling.
However I really, really hope that users would get the option of paying publishers directly instead of seeing ads. This is where reason 2 comes into play, it provides a market price for us to pay for the content we consume - just pay what an advertiser would pay.
Yeah, I don't understand Chrome users either.
> Edit:
People already do this with mixed success. There's also nothing stopping you from modifying the browser falsely report that the user actually viewed the ads.
But if you are receiving payment for spoofing, you will have a lot more interest in doing it effectively. Especially if the payment is in cryptocurrency, which can't be reversed.
Ads will be opt-in and use a separate open source coomponent.
Anonymous donations (prototyped with bitcoin already, see Payments panel in Preferences/Settings) are opt-in too and they will remain bundled by of course off by default. With user-private ad slots, we expect users will auto-donate their monthly revenue to their top sites.
My biggest beef with ads is the tracking and Brave seem to have a really nice solution to that. I think a lot of people will like it. Personally, I don't want my machine involved in any of the logistics of getting ads presented to me. I think ads should embedded directly in the content and whatever content providers and advertisers need to do to keep each other honest should be their concern, never the users. That's all they ever should have been allowed to do. Just because they've been able to track users in a creepy kind of way for the past decade or two, doesn't mean it's a good path forward, at least for users. Keeping it local is the least creepy solution, but only if no tracking is not an option and, at least for now, it is.
The problem is most publishers do not have scale, and (flip side of same coin), together they are too numerous, for publishers to do direct sales to brands of all or even their best ad space (inventory). They must use third parties.
Advertisers, too, want to "buy audience" across many sites, which means tracking in the current ecosystem.
Thus, today, in any of the top browsers that lack ad and tracker blocking, your machine is already deeply involved in "the logistics of getting ads". Almost all ads, even direct sold ones, place via script on page interacting with the main ad server scripts (Google Doubleclick For Publishers [DFP]).
You can't have it both ways: either you need an active user agent that blocks third party cookies and scripts, as Brave and a few others do; or you will have ad logistics running amok on your device, in your browser or webview (which is why we get a 3-7x speed win on Android vs. Chrome). The only path forward is to break the web by blocking third party scripts and trackers. Wishing for publishers to do direct ads as if pasting up ad art on paper won't work.
Of course, Ethereum users snap it up at ICO within a single block for something like $33 million. There's way too much stupidity in that market at the moment.