I'm not particularly impressed with their business. In fact I'm pretty disgusted with it.
https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/
Users can then choose to contribute some or all of those funds back to the publishers/creators they visit that have signed up to Brave's platform. They try to do this all in as privacy-preserving a manner as possible.
Stop spreading FUD.
In my opinion this is also the ideal system since it removes the fundamental problem of advertising. And that is that when a company relies on advertising, their customer is no longer the people visiting their site - but the advertisers they make money from. This can lead to advertiser influence slowly creeping into every aspect of the site, including the content that is created. By directing the ad revenue to the user who then directs it to sites (at their discretion) it keeps the benefits of "free" sites, while removing all the nastiness that generally comes with ad-based revenue systems by untangling the relationship between advertiser and content creator.
> They'll s/page_ads/brave_ads/
My point was that this literally does not happen. Brave does not insert ads into pages, ever, it only removes them. I'll admit I'm skeptical of the whole cryto-currency model, too, but I try to keep my points factually accurate.
The only connection is that your browsing activity determines how much each content provider is owed.
Brave and BAT is the most credible solution to this problem I’ve ever seen.
In any case it's a great browser, at least better than Chrome when it comes to privacy, and I personally won't fall for the propaganda. Just like Tesla, there is a lot of "old" money that is threatened by the upstart so there is also a lot of negative sentiment.
Personally, I find it more than adequate, and I agree with their mission a lot more than the other browser vendors.
"If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators."
Previously:
"Previous versions ... would then hold contributed funds for those publishers in escrow until they’d verified. [And] Funds that were contributed from user-funded wallets will be held indefinitely, until the publisher verifies and transfers them to their own wallet."
That sounds like they had a suboptimal policy, realized it, and fixed it. If they _keep_ their 5% cut, or the interest on it, from contributions to unverified creators, I'll share your criticism.
If you don't put out videos tomorrow because of this I will watch someone else's content. If you produce something truly unique put it out there for money and I will make an informed choice on whether I want to pay for it.
If not, what if I had a special pair of glasses that obscured such billboards or other physical advertising? It's not possible today, but not that hard to imagine in the near future.
How are these situations different from blocking ads on the web?
I would argue they are still comparable in terms of "autonomy of attention".
Was it immoral to tape a show and fast forward through the ads?
This means that advertising inherently is not something you "opt into" when you visit a page. You are being tracked everywhere you go.
That's the problem brave solves, but it accepts that removing ads without another system to reward content creators is important - hence BAT.
- Overuse of tracking, including nefarious attempts to de-anonymise users through excessive fingerprinting
- Crappy, distracting, in-your-face ads
- Ad networks serving malware (rare, obv)
If ad networks focussed on ridding the world of these issues, more people would be happy to let the ads through and help support content creators through ads.
All adds are subconscious manipulation.
I hate them, no matter if they track me or are in-your-face. I will always use an ad-blocker, but allow ads if a site asks me to do so, and I enjoy the content.
But I realize I'm probably in a minority here. Most users would not bother with adblockers if ads would not degrade the web experience so much.
So why when my maximum benefit is blocking ads AND viewing content should I change my behavior.
Blocking ads has been a thing for 17 years and will probably be a thing for the next 17.
If you could force me to watch your ads you wouldn't have to ask
Anything available on the web, an open platform, is free to view by design. To make it not free, you as a publisher are required to take extra steps which do not presume control over the client computer. If you don't like this, perhaps the web platform is not the one you intended to use.
Charge for it instead of uploading it to a platform that shows ads, OR upload it to a platform that can't be used with adblockers!
If people don't want to look at your ads they wont. Don't like it charge money.
A decade or so ago ad-blocking was extremely esoteric. Today it's reaching a majority on all devices excluding mobile. Though mobile will also likely follow a similar esoteric->majority trajectory. In any case it should be clear that the status quo of advertisements isn't going to last. Google trying to break ad-blocking in Chrome feels very much analogous to the old dinosaurs in the music industry trying to cling onto CDs. Users hate unsolicited ads and, in the end, it's a losing battle to try to force everybody to keep watching them.
The point of this is that that money you're being offered is money that would not exist otherwise. These people are not going to watch your ads, period. You're free to take it, and you're free to not take it - it'll eventually be returned to the people that wanted to give it to you. But complaining about it's very existence is peculiar. It's like if you only accept PayPal and I said I don't use PayPal but I'd be happy to send you money through e.g. Stripe. If you don't want to setup a Stripe account to accept my money then that's completely your choice, but to complain about it just seems petulant.
But even if you're right, why is it unethical for me to install software on my own computer to render websites differently than the creator intended? For example, by removing ads? Or replacing ads with different ads? Or rendering all ads upside down?
Even if I promise to give most of the money I make back to the original content creator, I really have no right to the small part I skim.
Update: Sorry didn't mean to suggest it was unethical for you to view a page any way you want, but I think the creators of the Brave browsers are scuzzy.
Update Two: I see now that Brave have updated the policy and will only collect funds for creators that have opted in.
It's not unethical for you to run that program, but what is being argued is that Brave (the company) is acting unethically, for example by taking donations on behalf of other people without their consent[0].
Just curious, what exact sentence(s) from the above links to the Brave website do you see contradicting this claim about "shadow wallets"? (if that's the correct wording)
When I read something like this, it almost sound like they're making wallets (without necessarily asking beforehand):
> If you own a website, or even just a blog or other sub-domain on a hosting site, we’ll create a site wallet for you.[0]
Am I reading that wrong?
- make you a wallet and let you claim it later?
- keep the token?
Neither of these constitute a hostage situation. There's no buying in except the time it takes to move that token to an exchange and turn it into dollars or kgs of cocaine or whatever.
> - keep the token?
The problem is pretending to do the first while actually doing the latter (when the token isn't claimed after X days, etc...)
I still think it's less shady than the concept of advertising in the first place. I have yet to come across a satisfying definition of malware that doesn't also describe web advertising.
Exploiting this grey area in the law will lead to a response from the courts and lawmakers. That response might well require that browsers display pages exactly as the publisher intends.
In other words, the end of ad blockers and other tools, thanks to Brave.
(Not at all unlikely given that Google seems to want that too.)
The issue here is one party making money, without consent of any form, based on another party's published materials.
So, google’s search engine business?
That said, there is an argument to be made here. One that's included in the disputed EU copyright directive in the 'link tax'.
It shouldn't be illegal to not request certain parts of a site, and it shouldn't be illegal to choose not to render parts of a page. What should be illegal is taking credit for copyrighted material, and that's not what going on.
The issue here, as opposed to just stripping ads, is that a totally unrelated party is making money with ads.
IANAL, but I highly doubt that the government will mandate what browsers people run on their computers. Outside of North Korea, of course.
Unrestricted mathematics are too dangerous to be allowed to normal people.
Piracy is already considered theft. Viewing webpages without ads is basically “stealing” web content. I would not be surprised in the slightest if some big advertiser runs with this idea and lobbies for strict legislation. And they likely would succeed, quite honestly. Congress doesn’t understand adblocking or the internet, but they have a vague idea of digital piracy.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...
And on their own site:
Your first link is to a tech journalist who misreports what we actually do, for reasons I cannot fathom and won't guess at.
Anyway, we do not replace publisher ads we block. Check it out for yourself.
>They monetize the content of others and don't tell them.
Would it be nice to reject these donations? Sure. But we don't demand that with any other transmission service. If Eich and the user concede to the terms and if you accept the money, what is the problem moral or otherwise?
As for the hypothetical youtuber, they are always free to put product ads directly in their videos if they can/want to. However, if they can only make money via abusive 3rd party trackers, that's on them.
Tom Scott was not happy with Brave. They were collecting ad revenue for Youtubers who had never opted into their platform.
He had to go make a stink to their CEO, and finally after lots of pushing back, the CEO ceded that maybe this is not the best thing to do!
Tom Scott ended up being happy with Brave resolving an early product misstep.
You should really be across an issue - and its resolution - before deciding to use it to cast shade on a software project.
For more reasonable-minded developer folk Eich addressed this again recently on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1139384765700685824
It sucks, but at the same time, if you're going to be an honest actor in crypto, you better cross every t and dot every i, because bad actors are everywhere and so smart people just assume bad faith and are arguably correct to do so.
People bending themselves backwards to hate Brave for doing things that are really not that different from what the big boys do.
No, and they don't. See meta nosnippet and robots.txt.
If the big boys did what Brave did, they would be sued to oblivion.