The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web
wired.com
wired.com
That being said, the tokens are basically worthless. This is not what the digital advertising industry wants and Brave is not going to get any decent advertisers with this. They'll end up with the same shady affiliate/performance marketers running CPA ads currently infesting all the 'content recommendation' widgets.
But it was very little money and it was probably costing more electricity than the money they were getting but for a teenager it was ok.
That's why users get tokens for viewing, why users can turn the ads off entirely, and why the tokens are tradeable on exchanges. It creates a built-in feedback mechanism. If BAT is priced too low, then everybody will opt out of ads (because it won't be worth it to them), very little BAT will be available on the market, and advertisers will have to bid up the price of BAT to run their ads. If BAT is priced too high, there will be excess ad inventory, no advertisers will buy in, and the price of BAT will fall until it reaches an equilibrium.
AllAdvantage.com failed in a large part because they mispriced the rebates going back to users. They burned through all their VC cash, didn't provide enough value to advertisers, and went out of business. Brave avoids that by letting the market make the pricing decisions.
This is something that couldn't have been done at all before cryptocurrencies, which is what makes this project somewhat interesting.
Why would users opt-in at all to see ads when they're already blocked?
There seems to be missing component of why both sides want to interact through the Brave network.
Brave's model - like all ad-supported ones - depends upon them getting very big, enough that they get a substantial fraction of total user attention. They're going for this by blocking all existing ads, which in today's web makes the browser significantly faster and less annoying. They're at about 5.5M users as of January 2019, up from 3M in July 2018. That's still a long way to go, but it's growing fast.
> Why would users opt-in at all to see ads when they're already blocked?
Because they get money for it.
In that case, it's just an ad network. Users watch ads, publishers get paid. Only difference is a new middleman and 2 hops for payments.
Also if the money does add up to a sizable amount then it will be overrun by ad fraud.
There is no way around this kind of automation, except perhaps given some pretty invasive rootkitting done my the browser (and that still doesn't mitigate the virtualisation problem).
Given that these things are possible or even pretty easy to do, it is an inescapable fact that this model will fail.
When that becomes a real motivation, it'll collapse the system, because view-fraud will either overwhelm honest views or Brave will be forced to take invasive measures to try to prevent such fraud.
No wonder Brave is trying to pay people with a useless e-token.
How many of those users just use it as an adblocking browser and don't engage with the BAT aspect?
It doesn't price attention (which cannot be measured) it prices ad deliveries to the user agent. Once a threshold of interest is raced, the incentive to create a discrepancy between the latter and former to make off with BAT for, easentially, free (devaluing actual attention) will either collapse the system or force Brave into all the intrusive measures other vendors who want to try to assure customers that interactions being monitored involve actual human attention have taken in the past.
How about the more privacy-respecting Firefox with an ad-blocker?
I'm not saying that is the answer, or that Brave/BAT is not the answer. I'm just saying if battery life is what you care about, there are better alternatives.
There's no evidence that ad blocking can scale. Seems a bit like suggesting reducing the cost-per-mile by blocking a car's licence plate and skipping out on paying for gas. It's technically an alternative, but not one that can work for everyone.
Yay! Then things go back to nerds willing to pay for hosting. Then maybe the internet will go back to being an information resource rather than a machine for monetizing my attention and emotions
They render your presence as more or less invisible unless you're constantly spamming your followers with low-content posts and ruining your website with lead-gen focused blog posts.
This is absolute bullshit: people will pay more than they realize for content, and people will produce it for free. One way or another people will consume content. We should all encourage the reduction of useless crap on the internet that exists solely to drive ad views. The faster we all block ads the faster we move past ads.
I suspect if literally everyone on the internet blocked ads today, we would have an extremely short time of excellent free content + paid subscription content before moving to a micro-transaction model.
But with each passing year, media companies are implementing ways to be less reliant on digital ad revenue, either via sponsorships, native advertising, conferences etc.
While we would lose some valuable content, the unpicking of the advertising monster from the world could only be a positive.
It preys on interpersonal communication and human psychology, and exploits everything good and trustworthy that it can to turn it into more dollars for itself.
Let's move to a post-advertising economy please, by taking back control of our eyeballs.
They did not test with uBlock Origin (which does not display ads).
Brave may still do better, but I bet FF with uBlock Origin will do better than FF with uBlock.
Besides that, Brave is a browser first, currency layer/ad network second. It doesn't need advertisers. It needs users. The more users it has, the more value there is for advertisers too.
The Stratechery website charges $10/mo for what is essentially a tech consultant's take on SV company product strategy. This is a narrow niche, and the site isn't one that will get millions of ad views. So there aren't any ads at all, and as a bonus, there aren't any throwaway blog posts designed to be shared on social media.
I use ad blockers because advertising doesn't add anything meaningful to my experience. I don't think there are a lot of ublock users who actually miss seeing ads.
Anyone who's been involved in the current ad-tech industry knows it's a total tire fire of fraud, technical incompetence and deep hostility to end-users.
Brave's model is very interesting and also a threat to the current ad-tech cesspool, so there should be no surprise to see attempts to misinform people about the model.
Brave doesn't replace ads with other ads.
Brave is a browser first, with an economic layer that will support all sorts of opt-in economic activity in a privacy-respecting way.
The tokens have a market price of more than zero.
Advertisers already include brands like Vimeo and Vice, and many within the ad industry appreciate the model Brave is attempting.
Using on-device machine learning to deliver relevant ads, while at the same time protecting privacy by not sending that data over the wire is a rather brilliant idea.
It certainly remains to be seen what advertisers are convinced to trial this approach, but predictions based on a very wonky understanding of the Brave model aren't particularly interesting.
Why would I use Brave over a modified Firefox install?
You can read a lot more detail within the research section of their site [1].
My previous browser setup was Firefox Dev Edition with uBlock origin, but Brave is just a better browser all-round now so I've completely switched.
I particularly like where the sync-chain stuff is going [2].
But really I think one of the coolest features is one click per-site configuration of scripts/cookies/fingerprinting. For instance most paywalls that have pop-in paywalls to try to 'tease' the user rely on scripts. This paywall is now removed by clicking the lion icon (in the top right) and then clicking on scripts blocked. And this is automatically then saved per site.
Another neat little feature is similar one-click functionality for single-instance Tor windows. Imagine a site is geoblocked, blocked by your government, or you'd simply like to see what a site would return from another country or with no information at all on you. You can right click on a link and select 'Open link in private window with Tor', and you can then similarly change identities with a single click. Awesome stuff.
All this said, I think the GP comment is correct. I'm attracted to Brave because of these sorts of features and I will never once enable ads, even if I'm paid to do so. In my, perhaps eccentric, opinion I think ads are psychologically harmful at scale. Everybody thinks they are not affected by ads, yet look at consumer behavior at large and we've become incredibly irrational market actors. And companies continue to pump out trillions of dollars on ad spending. One of these groups is right, and I think it's clear which one. As such, I'm not arrogant enough to believe myself immune to such effect, so yeah - no thanks.
Microtransactions have been tried many times. I spent half a million testing it. Didn't work because of user behavior. And unless users are buying with their own money, it's just converting the BAT they earn from ads into BAT they pay the publisher. This is an ad network.
Even the block-and-replace-ads model has been tried before. Everything from iframes to browser toolbars. Again, this is an ad network.
If you have to use language like "economic layer" to describe your business model, you're either hiding something or you don't have one. Or we can just use the standard definition: brave is a browser-based ad network.
I don't see how Brave has to win over advertisers at all, they'll come around when Brave can offer some non-insignificant amount of money to them.
Also the current trade of content for ads makes sense. When it's opt-in, I fail to see why users would enable ads if they can get the content for free anyway. And if the ads are all low-end spam then I definitely don't see why they would choose them.
It's a very tough 3-way marketplace to bootstrap where the user has all of the control and none of the incentive.
Sure, but folks I know use it because it has other utilities than just block ads (like use less power, for instance) whilst retaining the compatibility that comes with being based on Chromium.
> Also the current trade of content for ads makes sense.
When the rate of folks blocking ads keeps increasing, does it though, in the long run?
> When it's opt-in, I fail to see why users would enable ads if they can get the content for free anyway. And if the ads are all low-end spam then I definitely don't see why they would choose them.
I hope you do realise the number of ifs and buts in your assumptions?
> It's a very tough 3-way marketplace to bootstrap where the user has all of the control and none of the incentive.
I realise that you are intimately familiar with the industry, but it takes a substantial rethink to overhaul something as entrenched as the online ad business.
There's novelty to Brave's approach, I don't think anyone can deny that. Browsers are gateway to the web, equally how Google (homepage) is, and folks are right to take that market on, instead of taking the giants like Facebook and Google at their own game.
I would like to refer you to how telegram has replaced browsers for most folks I know (they literally use it to search memes, videos, photos, links); and how WhatsApp has replaced email. The ads would be where content is. If browsers increasingly act as arbitrators of that content, then they're best placed to monetize it, as well, imo.
It is another matter for folks who simply detest ads, they're not intended users Brave is targeting, but some folks do feel guilt blocking them and wouldn't mind a middle ground. Also, you must realise that a large portion of the internet don't use any form of ad-blockers whatsoever, and when they stumble on Brave (because it is great for battery life and other features), they'd be more than happy to keep seeing ads that aren't all encompassing and privacy respecting, I'm sure.
No, once it has users, advertisers need to advertise in a way which Brave does not manage to block. There are a number of already known methods for that; they are less cost effective than current ad models, but so would be what Brave is offering.
This made me smile slightly. If you don't mind me asking, why?
The microtransaction opportunities that are opened up by having such a low-friction economic layer native to the browser is what's particularly interesting about Brave.
Even the criticisms of Brave's microtransaction potential are encouraging, because they're usually unserious, rely on hand-waving references to previous weak and incomparable attempts and appear to emanate from accounts that have an agenda beyond good-faith technical / behavioural evaluation.
I understand the need to incorporate an optional ad network within it, and already see that it's a far superior model compared to the current ad-tech ecosystem that it can and should replace.
It remains to be seen whether it can get commercial traction but considering how quickly and deeply the mood has shifted against Google / Facebook / the current ad-tech ecosystem you'd have to say there has been no better time to trial a new approach to funding content on the web.
And if people aren't spending their own money then it's just an ad network in the browser to replace an ad network on the page. Not revolutionary and open to all the same concerns of ads today. 99% of people don't notice "privacy", they care about intrusiveness and annoying experiences. That's what's visible so having an ad is the same effect for them regardless of how it's delivered.
If you want to judge my perspective then read this first [1]. It's great to have alternatives and I'm as interested as you to see how this experiment works out.
Your exploratory attempts with a browser plugin do not sound comparable to what Brave is attempting.
Attempting to dismiss Brave by begging the question isn't convincing: "Brave won't succeed and isn't revolutionary if we assume the revolutionary bits won't succeed."
Claiming - after your initial uninformed and dismissive commentary - to now be an honest and good-faith participant is curious.
Innovating on a new utility-scale ad / content model in a multi-sided market with a new browser relying on a new cryptoeconomic infrastructure which if successful threatens huge, well-funded industry participants is certainly a challenge.
But the Brave team are pretty peerless when looking at the needed skillset, the moment in time for an industry-wide shift seems to be here and the mix of incentives: battery life, speed, memory, privacy, user growth pool tokens for donations, future content payment options, on-device learning model, zero-knowledge proof privacy, cross-device syncing etc are very compelling.
>> Microtransactions are about user behaviour and tech.
Cool. As I said, the tech part is easy and has been solved plenty of times before. What's the solution to user behavior? Brave doesn't have one.
>> Innovating on a new utility-scale ad / content model in a multi-sided market with a new browser relying on a new cryptoeconomic infrastructure
These are buzzwords. Nobody cares. I analyze based on the fundamental principles: An ad network is not new. Microtransactions are not new. Combining them is not new.
Brave claims ads are overrun by middlemen and yet is a just another middleman. BAT is useless in the real world where advertisers and publishers are, and exchanging crypto for currency is more taxes and middlemen.
Brave claims to stop fraud but has no counter. Measuring attention accurately is an unsolved problem and only made harder when it's decentralized and hackable. Ad fraud isn't because of opacity in adtech, it's because of a lack of consequences, something Brave again has no answer for.
If you want to claim you're revolutionary but yet have no new business model, no plan on changing user behavior, and use buzzword-laden descriptions, then yes there's a high chance it's not going to work. Of course anything can happen and I welcome it if it's successful, but I really don't care either way.
Knowing this and re-reading your contributions (and particularly this last one) suggests there's no useful debate to be had here.
You're also incorrect because I don't compete with Brave and have no vested interest in adtech. I actually spent time and money on regulation and our marketing SaaS works the same regardless of environment.
Almost all of your comments on this page consist of you telling other people that they are mischaracterizing while offering no clear arguments of your own.
The model that could work would be a large network with a single-sign-on ad-free subscription. Charge $20 per month and slice it to the participating sites based on analytics.
This works because it's about eliminating customer risk and burden.
* A large network helps to reduce the "what if I do't read a lot of articles from this publisher every month?" risk.
* Going for an ad-free subscription instead of a paywall subscription reduces the risk of commitment if you can't preview the content.
* A flat monthly fee removes the risk of "what if I get sucked down a rabbit hole and read 500 stories instead of 10 this month" and the burden of having to decide if you're willing to pay for any one individual article.
But that's a criticism of a specific implementation of microtransactions.
In a future Brave / BAT world where a variety of microtransaction experiments can play out, I'd imagine a bunch of un/successful experiments that then start to gain wider adoption depending on the industry / publisher.
Maybe the transaction is just for specific goods, like ebooks, higher quality video feeds etc, or maybe it's a time spent cost with a standardized market rate up to a maximum amount which reflects a weekly / monthly unlimited subscription.
Attention-based microtransactions are much more feasible with something like BAT + Brave (with its on-device machine-learning model).
Maybe even with everything planned it still fails, but as the experiments haven't even started it'll be interesting to see what, if anything takes.
No no. If you want advertisers you need to offer a return on investment. That's it. Any rational advertiser is going to pump as much money as has a return into advertising.
Brave's stated model is disingenuous at best.
[1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/24/brave-browser-is-c...
An earlier version of the browser let early adopter users direct where Brave's own marketing budget of BAT tokens was sent to, including sites that hadn't yet signed up.
If those sites didn't sign up, the tokens would eventually go back into the marketing budget pool of tokens, to be distributed to other sites (not to Brave).
That's very different to the mischaraterisation you mention above, but no surprise as Brave's model is a threat to the current fraudulent ad tech ecosystem.
They did make changes to the product immediately after that episode though. Now if you want to donate to a site that hasn't registered your browser will try for a period of time, and if the publisher doesn't sign up the tokens are returned to you to distribute elsewhere.
Any honest onlooker doing the barest of research would understand the absurdity of the claim, but the amplification of that mischaracterisation was (and is) clearly aimed at herd programming to try to suppress Brave's growth.
I'm not saying its a Patreon for thieves, and that doesn't make what they did less unsavory IMO.
Brave does not replace publisher ads with their own.
Brave does not block first party ads. Google's search ads display. Facebook's ads display. Twitter's ads display.
Brave does block other ads by default, and as a user agent, it's reflecting the valid, ethical choices of the user not to load the untrustworthy content and scripts from these poorly-coded, user-hostile third party ad networks.
If a user opts-in to Brave's ad ecosystem, then they've also made a decision about what content funding model they want to support.
There are many browsers out there, but till now there's really only been one privacy-invading ad model.
Now we have not just another browser, but another ad model which respects privacy, and after all we've learned about the current ad-tech ecosystem I'd prioritise user agency over all other considerations.
If the primacy of user agency begins to take hold, then the market will adapt and survive and even thrive within this new model.
Because he didn't exclude first-party ads? That's what you consider to be not reflective "at all"?
Just pretend he said "all non-Adsense third-party ads" and then educate us against whatever additional misconceptions you perceive him and us to hold.
That functionality is on the roadmap, but Brave has stated that will only occur with publisher consent.
Keep an eye out for accounts that try to push this mischaracterisation and see if they're linked to the existing ad tech industry...
So I guess if you want to be technical, Brave either swaps with nothing or with their own ads.
First party ads aren't blocked.
Publisher ads aren't swapped.
If a user opts-in to Brave's model for ads, they are system-level notifications which lead to full-page ads that aren't linked to any website.
You keep making vague accusations of shilling so I'll turn the tables - what exactly is your connection to Brave?
I have no connection with Brave.
Anyway, on reddit the user with the same name has deleted their account but this one is still active and active in the BAT / Brave subreddits. [0]
Full disclosure: I came to root against Brave after seeing how Tom Scott was treated and how that whole debacle went. I don’t even work in Tech so really, I shouldn’t care.
If your product has to be opt-out to have a chance of success, then it's a failure from day one.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/user/justsee_/posts/
edit: opt-out in regards to the creaors being sent BAT by users without knowing about that. i.e. the Tom Scott Fiasco.
And they did make it opt-in for receiving 'real' tokens, as far as I can tell from the last few minutes of searching. The UGP tokens can still be sent at people that didn't opt-in, but those are more like coupon codes than money. Users can only get them for free, and they have an expiration date.
No they don't, I've been using the Brave browser for over a year on desktop, with the users ads activated
This is the most common seen misconception on HN about Brave, Brave is not replacing ads with their own ads
It just doesn't work like this
A great comment from a Brave team member about that misconception on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/bby4um/the_la_ti...
It absolutely both blocks (many) pre-existing ads and places its own ads. Those are both overt features of the browser.
> If a user opts-in to Brave's ad ecosystem, then they've also made a decision about what content funding model they want to support.
It's not really a content funding model, since whether Brave shows (and derives revenue) for ads or not (and whether it blocks the ads the content supplier has decided to place or not) has nothing to do with any agreement or payment to the content source; it's a browser funding model.
The content funding model it (indirectly) promotes is the covert “organic” advertising model, where rather than being separated and distinguished from the editorial content, the promotional content is integrated with and inseperable from the organic content.
No it does not, I've been using the Brave browser for over a year on desktop, with the users ads activated
This is the most common seen misconception on HN about Brave, Brave is not replacing ads with it's own ads
It just doesn't work like this
A great comment from a Brave team member about that misconception on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/bby4um/the_la_ti...
This alone is enough of an inflammatory and conspiratorial statement that I have a hard time taking you seriously. It's a bad look to cry "shill" in the face of fair criticism.
They only backed down when one of the content producers who had no relationship with them and did not want a relationship with them cried foul.
https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1085238644926005248
"A final update on the thread about Brave: they're now opt-in for creators! While it's still possible to tip folks who haven't opted in, the data is stored in-browser and the UI has been clarified. These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!"
Your [2] reference has nothing to do with me. That's not my handle. If we err, we'll fix the error when it is pointed out clearly. If we are attacked with misinformation, we'll defend. Same as you'd want to do if roles were reversed.
But this sounds more like a protection racket.
Beautiful ads, govnah. Would be a shame if somfin' 'appened to 'em.
Not sure what your motivation is here in asserting something which is completely false.
Ads are blocked by default, and their research team is pioneering new approaches to ad blocking. See for instance https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155
The browser is also open-source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
- no ads
- native ads
- cleaned ads
It's totally up to the user to choose what they want.
But the whole reason “pay for ad-free experience” model isn't dominant is that advertisers, in fact, are willing to pay more for exactly the people that would pay the most to opt out of ads (because those are the people with the most money), not pay more for the people who would opt in to ads. So the premise is known to be the opposite of the truth.
Would anyone like to argue that the present web financial model is fine? Or would anyone like to point to someone else who has an alternative that would be workable and is anywhere near usable?
And let met add one more point. Any workable alternative is not going to be perfect, so the fact one is not is not, at least alone, a reason to not use it.
But again, let me ask all the brave critiques, what is your alternative? And by that I mean that can be used by your average user, not something only a techy can make work.
I don’t agree that the web needs any financial model at all. Content creators want a financial model and advertisers wants to continue to be in business, but neither of those desires indicates a “need” for a single financial model for the web.
The mother of a friend of mine lives in a low cost of living area and makes her entire living from writing gay BSDM anime fan fiction. She has more than 1k monthly subscribers, no ads.
The web does not need attention merchants.
Snark aside, independent artists already do this with Patreon and digital music services.
If they publish a good article, I'd like to see them get paid for it so they can make more good articles, but I'd also not like to be mined for data. I also don't want to be inconvenienced trying to subscribe, because it is completely impractical to keep track of hundreds of individual subscriptions.
Not sure why everyone is so negative about this here but it seems like a very useful idea.
So people can pay to buy tokens but can't sell them, seems legit.
But I thought the point of Brave was to pay content authors. Wouldn't a simpler and more consistent solution be to make it so that if a viewer received a payment for viewing ads (man that is hard to type) that the money is held in escrow until they pay it out to a site the user has visited?]
They just can't convert any BAT rewarded for ad participation into fiat right now.
It's on the roadmap though, but even then you'll have to go through KYC AML providers so there'll be no option of anonymous earnings.
Would seem a really stupid move...
When BAT is paid out to people surfing the web, does someone knows what ads they saw, maybe what webpages they visited to see those ads?
A user model is built on-device to allow for opt-in targeted ads, but that model does not leak across the wire.
Because the user model is not bound by a security sandbox, it can build a much richer model of user behaviour than even the most invasive ad-tech solutions that exist right now.
So Brave claims end-users get more relevant, targeted ads and more privacy, because this model can't be accessed off-device.
It sounds good in theory, and now ads are live we'll get to see how true it is in practice.
- Net Neutrality violating deals by ISPs/BigTech.
- Users forced to install apps (in a bid to escape the browsers).
- Native advertising, where ads are indistinguishable from actual content.
...and so on. Is Brave's model any worse [0]? For better or for worse, things will continue to change.
[0] IIRC, they have more than 10M installs. I reckon, if they hit 100M or so, they'd be fatal to the ad-networks. I don't see any other tech today wielding that kind of threat? Adblockers might have higher installation numbers, but they don't solve the problems for the content creators, so they are not really the solution to this mess we are in, imo.
Edit: There seems to be a ton of negative comments in this thread from people who have never actually used the Brave Browser. I would encourage anyone who is interested to actually install it and try it. The ads section is completely opt-in. The "auto-contribute" and "tips" features can be used without the ads. I feel the "auto-contribute" and "tips" features are what would really appeal to most HN readers.
Also this particular implementation is rather shady.
See podcast:
https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/francis-pouliot-on-th...
From what I remember, they're a closed platform. One must use their apps to get access to full article content. That's a nice solution for their partners, but not for the broader web (85%+ of the websites you stumble across that are not TIME, NYT, Economist, etc).
Blendle is a nice experiment, but I wouldn't consider it a solution to the problem being discussed here.
The economics, fraud analysis, requirement to go through KYC / AML hoops to extract and convert to fiat would mean it's not a viable mechanism to enrich yourself.
I'll be 100% frank: I never want to look at another advertisement again and I'm ok if the entire economy tanks because of it.
I doubt that the people who downloaded it to avoid advertising will sign up for this without paying them a lot.
Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term.
I only use and recommend Brave now, but have no intention of turning on ads.
People have tried microtransactions in lieu of ads, many, many times over the past decade. Hardly any users are interested, and those that aren't don't want to pay enough to keep the lights on at the websites they are visiting.
This is an idea that's incredibly popular in techie circles, and falls flat on its face with the rest of the world (Along with 'floss twice a day', 'just run your own mailserver', 'manually updating my OS/browser/dogsitting app is better, because I can control what runs on my computer', and 'compile all the software you run from source'.)
That changes everything about microtransactions.
I now have one location to top up and manage my wallet and can effortlessly pay for content across the web in a consistent, familiar way.
The historical approach of endlessly getting out a plastic card and typing private information into a multitude of different forms will seem terribly old-fashioned.
What's broken is the model of advertising on the web, the unregulated cesspool of greed, malware, tracking and dark patterns that led the public to inevitably reject ads wholesale as soon as it became widely known that it was possible to do so, and easy to implement.
It's business and corporate interests that have to find a way to survive on the web, but the web itself will be fine with or without them.
Similarly, the act of web browsing is content creation. It's data creation. Very valuable data.
If users are currently blocking ads in their power, why not entice them back by allowing them to make an appropriate amount of money from the data that only they have the power to give to others? 'Sell your data.'
The more one browsed or shared of their data, the more one would get paid. It's simple business.
It sounds like a model that would bring diversity to the economy.
One thing I did NOT expect is the noticeably faster performance. (Presumably due to the lack of ad content loading.)
This is a big deal at my house. We turned off wired Internet service to save money during a job search. (There's only one HS vendor in our neighborhood. (And this is in Austin. Go figure.) We're tethering our phones and foregoing any high-bandwidth use cases.
Has anybody published performance benchmarks?
> Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.
I'm confused by this statement - there are currently several exchanges you can use to trade BAT for USD. Is this suggesting that the UI will be made more clear in the future, or are users actually blocked from withdrawing BAT from their wallet?
That said, I really don't like this scheme. Paying users with a worthless e-coin while putting your own ads on top of blocked ads? Why would site owners opt in to this? So they can monitor 2 different ad systems present on their site?
Not to mention, the conversion probability of a user who blocks ads is much lower than that of someone who sees ads daily. So how much would you really be earning by serving ads to people who specifically downloaded an adblocking browser?
If you do not want to watch any ads on the Internet, period, here's nothing the Brave browser can offer you than uBlock Origin cannot.
Remember, uBlock still displays ads, uBlock Origin does not display ads.
I think a couple things would make it less objectionable and more awesome:
1. don't block verifiably "clean" ads by default, which basically means lightweight, no JavaScript, etc. Something like AMP for ads. If a publisher wants to show their own ads, given them a reasonable way to do so without buying into the whole centralized Brave/BAT system.
2. don't allow users to keep the money they "earn" from viewing the replacement ads. Ideally hold it in an escrow smart contract that automatically sends it to a charity if the publisher doesn't claim it after a certain amount of time.
3. come up with a way for publishers to easily allow users to pay per-article. I don't pay for a WSJ subscription but occasionally I want to read an article. Let me easily pay, say, $0.25 per article, otherwise I'll continue to find ways around your paywall.
To acquire BAT at scale fraudulently from rewards will likely cost more than it's worth, and to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis.
I don't think they've published anything on fraud analysis, but what their research team has published is indicative of the calibre of Brave's team: https://brave.com/research/
Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? Otherwise I'm not sure what keeps people from withdrawing and trading on whatever sketchy exchange they want.
yes, afaik.
Everything I've seen about the browser seems tied to him, and generally his interactions with people seem testy and confrontational.
It's ironic that Google owns the browser and ad network. Brave wants to change that by creating a new browser and ad network. But until they can make brave less tied to him it'll be hard.
Full disclosure: I'm working on an alternative to Brave in the crypto space. But I'm not shilling it here.
But speaking about disclosure. What I find interesting about discussions of Brave are that many people chime in here without specifying their positions. I don't have BAT nor shorts on them. Do you have positions, do you own BAT or have a financial interest in their success?
>Our value add is free speech. A free speech browser. With a free speech app store. With free speech money. (Bitcoin.) We don’t care about saving advertising. We care about saving free expression. Fundamental difference. Fundamental USP.
Edit: Not talking about anyone's politics here, I'm talking about Brave's focus on advertising - not end user's freedom.