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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

Brave ads are targeted through on-device matching. I'm not sure how well this will scale tho. Described in "Relevance" here: https://brave.com/brave-ads-launch/

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Correct. Once a user opts-in, machine-learning bits on the user's device take over and begin to study browsing habits and interests. These ML bits then decide what types of ads are likely to be of interest to the user.

What are your scaling concerns? I'd love to hear more!

I would assume that once a lot of advertisers are on the platform the ad catalogue can quickly grow to the size of GBs, which would be unfeasible to hold on smartphones.

Catalogs are regional, and reflect only active campaigns. So far, the file hovers around 3 MB when compressed. We are able to optimize size even further, as needed. It will always remain small enough to be downloaded easily.

The catalog contains edge-cached URLs and metadata for the ads. The size remains small, as we're not compressing down images, rich media, video or other assets in the catalog.

(I work at Brave, and am on the team bringing the ad platform to market)

Could you clarify a tiny bit? I’m not sure I follow. If you are not including images or video in the ads, does that mean that you are downloading them at view time from somewhere, or that the ads have no images or video?

Also, what are edge cached urls?

Ads first appear as OS notifications on your desktop. This notification displays plain-text content from the regional ad catalog. You get 70% of the ad revenue at this point.

If you click the notification, Brave opens a tab in the Brave browser and navigates to the advertisement location. At this point, the ad can load images, video, etc.

Important to note, however, that ad pages are not given any special treatment in the Brave browser. They are subject to the same privacy/security restrictions on all other pages. Third parties are severely limited, if not entirely prevented from engaging in the session.

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