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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many of those users just use it as an adblocking browser and don't engage with the BAT aspect?
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.
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.
How about the more privacy-respecting Firefox with an ad-blocker?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.