Brave's strategy of replacing ads with other ads isn't going to do anyone any good. They could've used payment channels to build a content distribution network, but alas...
Over 600 million devices were running some form of ad-blocking software in 2017, and that was an increase of 30% from the year prior. This number keeps growing, year over year. Something has to be done.
Users who come to Brave are already blocking ads. They understand the risk involved in letting third-party software collect information about them, their person, their browsing habits, and more. Further, the risk of drive-by downloads is on the rise (or the growing popularity of crypto-jacking).
Brave blocks ads and trackers for safety and privacy reasons. But we are not so naive to miss the impact this has on well-meaning publishers. This is why we created the User Growth Pool, and the Brave Payments system. Every month we pour hundreds of thousands of dollars back into the pockets of content creators by way of BAT (Basic Attention Token) grants, distributed freely to users of the Brave browser.
But grants won't last forever, something sustainable has be erected in place of the incumbent digital advertising system. This is where Brave Ads comings into play.
For users who opt in, Brave can deliver better quality ads, without the risk of personal data leakage. We do this by using local machine-learning to understand the user better, and making local decisions as to which ads should or should not be shown, and when (the user controls all of this). Furthermore, the user gets 70% of the ad revenue for browser-private ads.
When you consider the amount of money lost to digital ad fraud each year (over $20,000,000,000 I believe), you can see how the Brave system would lead to a much better, and more sustainable future for the web.
We're not simply replacing ads. We're rescuing an industry.
I don't have any hard evidence, but I imagine most people block ads because they don't want to have to scroll past a bunch of banners and videos to read the article they want to read. Certainly there are many people who are concerned about privacy, but I don' think that's what's driving the popularity of ad blockers. At least personally I have always viewed ad blockers like DVRs for the web.
Google won't address the JavaScript problem with their ad network so I cut them off.
It took a crypto malware to convince a company I was working with to install uBlock. No more ads, no more flash, no more ransomware.
[1] https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/ultimate-guide-angler-explo...
My usage of ad-blockers is to make webpages _readiable_. When ever the privacy aspect of it comes up its like, "well that's nice." Just the bandwidth overhead of ads alone makes it worth it.
I run Adblock software for privacy, primarily.
When they pay me, they can get some of my data. I'm just waiting for their call.
It's the truth. You don't get to control how I render the page, on what device, whether I've decided to use links (or lynx) today, or any of that. It's my computing device, I'll render data as I please.
> I support the notion that having access to good content requires a way to compensate content creators.
Sure, but again if you send me the data, I'll render it as I see fit. Let's find another way that doesn't involve stalking, and trying to shove commercial messages in my face every few seconds.
That I know of. With smart TVs I guess it could well.
Because in my experience, offering paid options to remove all ads and tracking if you want doesn't stop or even put a dent in the adblocking crouds. Trying to not send content to those blocking ads only increases anger and often reduces the performance of the page for everyone, and gating all content behind paywalls is not only opposite to how I feel information should flow and impacts some users more than others (someone making minimum wage has to give up a lot more for a $1/month subscription than someone making $150k/yr), but also destroys the ability for many to discover my content, and makes discussion and interaction significantly harder.
And other approaches like closed off apps or alternate formats like video can be a much worse experience for the user, and can hurt those who need accessibility considerations.
So I genuinely want to know if there is a better way that I'm missing, because if I can't, then my options are to "sell my soul" and just try and for you to be tracked as much as I can, or just close down my service entirely (which if you ask my users, would be a bad thing and would negatively impact them)
Actually, the air of entitlement I detect in this entire discussion is around people who strongly believe that everything should be free and magically self-sustaining.
But neither do I believe that I'm obligated to render data the way you ask me to.
Your best bet is just to block folks like me. Make the deal explicit - turn on ads, get content. I'll probably move on somewhere else at that point.
I'm not going to be unblocking ads anytime soon.
Some widgets are useful. Most ads are not useful. Bundling your free widget with an advertisement doesn't mean I have an ethical obligation to look at the advertisement or keep it there.
If you want to make money on your widgets I'd recommend selling them rather than trying to sell your consumers to advertisers.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1478214
"Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults."
Also see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1989092 (64% find the idea of ad targeting to be invasive, most participants would prefer random ads to targeted ads) https://news.gallup.com/poll/145337/internet-users-ready-lim... (67% of those polled said advertisers shouldn't be able to "match ads to your specific interests based on websites you have visited")
References all came from a paper by Jonathan Mayer. Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology which I'd heartily recommend to anyone who is interested enough to be this deep into the comments (https://jonathanmayer.org/publications/trackingsurvey12.pdf)
Even an asshole like me will remove ublock origin if websites start to self-host ads. But they won't.
No one deserves to stay in business. If the model doesn't work, find one that does.
Brave is offering publishers a solution to their dying revenue streams. First, by way of monthly grants (we give $500k/mo to publishers right now), and secondly through a better advertising model. Note, publisher ads is not presently an option; we're testing user-private ads, which are ads shown in a private tab, not owned by any website.
Maybe the "digital ad fraud" they're screaming is the sign they belong rightfully in the void we're trying to bury them.
We've seen enough shit from the ad industry, and it's time to leave them behind as humanity progress and improve.
With Brave Payments, the user needs only to fund their wallet with BAT, and browse the web. By default, each property will receive a portion of the user's monthly allotment, relative to the amount of attention to user spent on that property's domain.
If a user has chosen to give $10 worth of BAT to 5 sites, and one of them received 80% of the user's attention, then that site will get $8 worth of BAT. The rest of the sites will get the remainder, pro rata.
Brave goes a step further though, and issues BAT grants monthly to users. So users don't need to fund their wallets to participate. Soon, users will be able to fund their wallet by opting into Brave Ads.
NYTimes seeing 2/3 of its digital revenue from subscriptions: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/business/media/new-york-t...
TheAthletic growing like wildfire on subscription model: https://www.adweek.com/digital/the-athletic-built-its-compan...
SubStack raises for subscription newsletters: https://www.axios.com/substack-raises-2-million-newsletters-...
The main reason I don't use Brave anymore is because I don't trust the Brave team to be transparent about what they're doing. I remember switching to Brave a year or two ago really rooting for them and the model they were positing. I though that blocking third-party JavaScript by default was a great idea - no more Firefox plugins! Well, I soon realized that Brave did not block all third-party JS and instead let "whitelisted"(by whom?) JS through. When I asked one of the Brave team members why this was so and informed them that I found this practice misleading at best I was given a song-and-dance about "rescuing the industry" instead of a technical explanation for the issue at hand(blocking third-party JS essentially didn't work).
I can't be bothered to use a browser who's developers can't be bothered to be honest about the feature set and how they work.
As for transparency, we couldn't be more open. Take it from me, an ex-Microsoft engineer, Brave is an open book. We talk about features before they're shipped, our source is open to all (github.com/brave/browser-laptop, github.com/brave/brave-browser, github.com/brave/browser-core, etc.), and we regularly host AMAs. The openness of this company still, to this day, gives me wonderful culture shock.
With regards to your conversation with one of the Brave team members, do you have a link? I'd love to gather context and establish a frame of reference. The only white lists we have in brave are for ua-strings and siteHacks.
For some websites, we'll identify ourselves as "Brave". To all others, we identify as Chrome. This is for many reasons (which I'm happen to discuss if you're interested), but this is the first white list. The second "white list" would be our siteHacks.js file. This file contains special logic to repair sites which are broken as a result of ad/tracker blocking. But again, this isn't letting flagged scripting through to the user, this is laying our own custom logic on top of an otherwise broken experience.
I hope this explanation helps shed some light on the matter. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please do not hesitate to reach out. Again, we're open and eager to share.
I pitched almost this same idea to Netscape in 1997. I managed to get a physical meeting with a fairly high level person, but was essentially laughed out the door. It’s interesting that you have a pool of users that have embraced this idea. Netscape - at the time the world’s dominant browser company - thought users would see this as too invasive. The quote I remember was “we just went through a shit storm over the rising use of cookies...this would be that x10”.
One thing that gives our users great comfort is the fact that this is an optional component. As it's baseline, Brave blocks ads and trackers. If you don't want to see them, you stick with the default, out of the box experience.
But advertising is what keeps the web open and free-to-low-cost for the masses. Walled gardens and paid subscriptions ad a high degree of friction to the industry; to much friction and you'll melt the system. Ads are a better route, for now. But ads, as we have come to know them online, are suffering greatly.
Brave's model gives the user the power to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree. As for client-side machine learning, I suspect users today will understand the benefits better than we would have 20 years ago. In fact, Tim Cook praised the iPhone and Apple Watch for utilizing similar features (using similar terminology).
Another difference between users today and users in the early-to-mid 90's is the lived experience. In the 90's, as a Netscape user myself, I had little concern about invasive ads and trackers. Sure, we had web bugs, but not anywhere on the scale of what we have today. Today, our attention is being harvested for the profit of others. This limited commodity is being sold around every corner, and everybody but me is getting a cut.
With Brave Ads, users who opt-in to the new experience will make as much as 70% of the ad revenue (70% goes to ad-slot owner, which is the user in the case of browser-private ads). Now, you're able to enjoy the benefits of high-quality ads, the liberty of being private and secure online, and a portion of the revenues themselves.
I'd love to know more about what you pitched, from a historical perspective. I always love an inside story :)
Websites that wanted to place targeted ads on their site could then do so with some special markup indicating exactly what criteria they wanted to use. They could specify an almost limitless number of different creatives and corresponding targeting criteria right in their HTML. My thought was that they could pay Netscape for the privilege of enabling highly targeted ads.
The privacy downfall here, at least in Netscape’s opinion, was that sites could extrapolate whether or not someone matched the criteria by watching to see which banner their browser downloaded. I countered this by having an option for the software to download 5 or 10 other banners in random order in addition to the one that actually met the targeting criteria in the background, but that wasn’t good enough to overcome the perception of privacy issues in their eyes.
Better models definitely exist, and I'm convinced Brave has proposed one with great potential. Let's catch up in 10 years to discuss this again ;)
Yeah, find some other way to make money than ads.
Whenever you tell me that I have to watch ads for the good of capitalism, I feel a horrible contradiction in my gut. I don't want ads at all.
It's like everyone has wasps and needs their wasps to get into my car and some businesses promise me that their wasps aren't so bad, so can I please roll down my windows so a few wasps get through? Honest, these are good wasps. You won't mind these wasps too much.
People don't want ads. Ads are inherently adversarial. They interrupt, they manipulate, they intrude, they try to provoke a need in you that you didn't have before you watched the ad. The conversation has to be about how do we do better than ads, not how do we do better ads.
Secondly, for those who opt in, they decide how often they'll see an ad. And unlike annoying interstitial ads and more, Brave Ads begin outside of the browser as a system notification. If you wish to see the ad, click the toast. If you don't, simply dismiss or ignore it.
As for the desire to see ads, many users (myself included) don't mind this. In fact, I enjoy high-quality ads that don't require me to give up personal information. I'd love to know about a sale at my favorite store, gift ideas for my wife's birthday, and more. The problem is, to get this today, I have to hand over too much to Google and Facebook. Unacceptable.
With Brave's on-device machine-learning, you hand over nothing. Ads are proposed to your device, and your device choosing what you might like to see. And you, as always, remain in complete control. Should you decide to see an ad, you'll even get paid for your attention (70% of the revenue in user-private cases).
But the baseline is always the same; if you don't wish to see Brave Ads, Brave won't show you Brave Ads. That's our promise to you.
I gain nothing by watching ads. All I get is the creation of a need or desire that I didn't have before I watched the ad. Ads increase demand. Telling me that your business will fail unless I voluntarily inconvenience myself is not endearing me to your business.
Life without endless, wheedling attempts to sell, upsell, and generally manipulate you into buying more crap is frankly better than the alternatives. I can’t tell you how many cord cutters I’ve met who lost their tolerance for tv advertisement once they weren’t bathing in it every day. Ads are miserable, they drive a consumer culture that is pointless, and lead to endless loads of clickbait and “content” thst exists just be a platform form advertisement.
The industry doesn’t need saving, it needs euthanizing.
You get the site getting revenue, which allows it to continue existing and creating the content you enjoy.
Are you suggesting that we make it illegal to enter into this kind of consensual and mutually beneficial business arrangement?
Ads are no longer pixels on the screen; they're so much more than that. They're monitoring your activity, your movement, your most intimate details, and more. They're collecting this data, storing it, selling it, and all without your consent.
Users have the right to protect themselves. Unfortunately, the current solution (simple ad-blocking) hurts the web and all who create it. Brave wishes to deliver a better solution; one that protects the user, and serves the content creator.
By improving the system, you reduce fraud, which in turn creates more revenue for the content creators and users alike. Everybody benefits under this model, unlike the current model, where everybody is equally, and increasingly suffering.
That's pretty interesting. So, as an online publisher, if I make my own deals directly with the advertisers and then host and serve the assets myself, Brave doesn't flag it.
I used to do this, but it's very time consuming. I've essentially delegated this work to Adsense.
Frankly, you should take responsibility for every resource that your web page pulls down. I don't really care whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it, but if your ad network is serving up malicious JavaScript on a regular basis, then they're not doing their job right and you should fire them.
You're still replacing ads with other ads.
The users have already responded en masse with the explosive growth of ad and tracker blocking software. We acknowledge the necessity for this move, as the industry has become overrun with parasites. But we also recognize that bloodletting isn't the solution; bleeding the publishers of their revenue isn't the solution.
Brave introduced Brave Payments as a means of supporting content creators. We're staking users with $500k/mo to support their favorite sites. But this isn't a short-term solution while we work on the long-term solution of reforming digital advertising.
If a website owner changes from an ad supported website to reading ad copy in a podcast, your same criticism would apply.
Yet:
* by changing from ads to ads they get rid of entire classes of bugs: cryptominers, drive-by malware, click-jacking, etc. Perpetuating a capitalist system by requiring users to take undue risks to support my content != perpetuating a capitalist system without making users take those risks.
* by changing from ads to ads, I get rid of an entire class of privacy-invasions for my audience. Perpetuating a capitalist system while making users leak enormous amounts of data to who knows where != an perpetuating a capitalist system without making users do that.
There are probably other points to make. But that's enough to assert that ads != ads in your comment.
Halting.
With that said, what jonathansampson is proposing mitigates at least one harm of advertising: ubiquitous tracking which violates privacy.
They're trying to replace ads with ads that don't require tracking by third parties.
There's actually a whole area of research on this that's pretty fascinating called privacy preserving advertising.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/serving... https://crypto.stanford.edu/adnostic/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/privad-... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6234417/
The BAT grant is just Brave burning VC money to get some market share and eventually some pie of the Adtech eco-system?
Also, not sure how ad fraud is relevant here or how Brave will prevent it?
The Basic Attention Token User Growth Pool was created during our Token Sale in 2017; not from VC funds.
Ad Fraud is relevant because it claims more and more digital advertising dollars each year. Estimate today put it over 20 billion. By reducing middle-men, clearing up reporting, and more, there is less revenue lost, and therefore more revenue for creators and users alike.
By moving ad-matching and more into the Browser, we make it much harder to defraud the system. Further, this system rests solely in the user's domain; you control what is shown and with what frequency.
For users who don't necessarily have the funds to purchase BAT, safe, private ads offers an option to learn BAT (which can, in turn, be given to their favorite sites).
I hope brave is able to make a dent in this system - alternatives and competitoin are always welcome.
We're currently testing user-private ads right now; these originate as signals outside of the browser (system-level prompts). If the user engages the notification, a private tab is opened and the advertisement is shown. In the future, we'll be testing publisher-ads (but only with publisher consent).
We'll have more information to share in the future on how quality will be handled. Please keep following official channels for further developments.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/28/after-supporting-prop-8-br...
JavaScript came along in 94/95 to breath life into the web. It's an amoral tool; what matters more is the hand that wields it. Sadly, many have chosen to do some pretty terrible things with it. But many more have chosen to do some pretty terrific things with it.
Brendan created JavaScript, helped it to grow strong, and is now here to combat the abuse we see online by those who have chosen to do harm with it. You're watching the arch of redemption unfold before your very eyes ;)
I've installed and tried Brave a few times for this specific reason that I keep reading about, but I've never figured out how to receive these kickbacks from enabling and viewing ads. Was I just not looking close enough, or is this still a beta/planned feature?
You realise that's what every ad-revenue driven company says right?
There are a number of proposed systems under the rubric of "privacy preserving advertising systems" and they are very different than what ad-revenue driven companies are doing today and similar to what he is proposing above.
This stinks of meaningless PR copy. You're rescuing an industry most people would like to see gone. If you want to do good, move away from Google-created products, and focus on the benefit for the common person, not for an industry.
Sorry. This is just wrong. You don't nor never will have the volume of data that the major ad platforms have collected for 15+ years. You don't have the pure analytical power of these companies in compute capacity. You will not serve better ads by disabling third party retargeting platforms.
There are many positive ways to spin an obvious blockchain-craze inspired endeavor, and I applaud the Brave team for blazing a trail, but you are calling out all the wrong value propositions.
Fraud is not as big of a deal as you state it is. It is not a problem for the primary ad networks to which the lions share of the ad revenues goes to in the first place. Companies like WhiteOps and Moat already do a great job of fraud detection when an advertiser is not buying from one of the popular and safer exchanges.
I applaud your conviction, but the problem with advertising is not solved by attempting to de-throne Google and Facebook.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/
> Advertising isn’t personal, and doesn’t have to be. In fact, knowing it’s not personal is an advantage for advertisers. Consumers don’t wonder what the hell an ad is doing where it is, who put it there, or why.
> Advertising makes brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into your brain by advertising. In fact the term branding was borrowed by advertising from the cattle business. (Specifically by Procter and Gamble in the early 1930s.)
> Advertising carries an economic signal. Meaning that it shows a company can afford to advertise. Tracking-based advertising can’t do that. (For more on this, read Don Marti, starting here.)
> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media. All the big pro sports salaries are paid by advertising that sponsors game broadcasts. For lack of sponsorship, media—especially publishers—are hurting. @WaltMossberg learned why on a conference stage when an ad agency guy said the agency’s ads wouldn’t sponsor Walt’s new publication, recode. Walt: “I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Versus the top four things he says about adtech:
> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative associations with brands. Consider this: perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, and not one brand known to the world has been made by it. (Bob Hoffman, aka the Ad Contrarian, is required reading on this.)
> Adtech wants to be personal. That’s why it’s tracking-based. Though its enthusiasts call it “interest-based,” “relevant” and other harmless-sounding euphemisms, it relies on tracking people. In fact it can’t exist without tracking people. (Note: while all adtech is programmatic, not all programmatic advertising is adtech. In other words, programmatic advertising doesn’t have to be based on tracking people. Same goes for interactive. Programmatic and interactive advertising will both survive the adtech crash.) Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy. By design. Never mind that you and your browser or app are anonymized. The ads are still for your eyeballs, and correlations can be made.
> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware. @ACFou is required reading on this.
> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism.
He also makes the point that adtech is fundamentally closer to direct marketing (mail spam, email spam... all spam except meaty SPAM):
https://medium.com/@dsearls/rethinking-john-wanamaker-3f9cfa...
Brave replacing adtech with advertising is intelligible if you understand the distinction being made.
For example, their first point about Advertising not needing to be personal is disingenuous. Advertising needs to be relevant, and personalization is one facet of relevancy. A perfect ad is 100% relevant to every buyer it is consumed by, meaning the ad is personalized for each consumer. Is personalization necessary? Not if your goal is inefficient advertising.
They are ensuring user privacy by doing all machine learning locally. Google had the unofficial "don't be evil" motto and Brave has "can't be evil" as a motto.