Brave Passes 10M Monthly Active Users, Sees 19% Growth Since 1.0 Launch
brave.com
brave.com
What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.
There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads
> but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why?
The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better
That's why I think it's inevitable for Netflix to get ads. Even if it's not a pre-roll ad, it could be just tons of in-content advertisements. Like they do with a lot of movies. Such as Sony movies, plenty of Sony phones, laptop, TVs, speakers, etc.
The only way to get rid of ads from your life, is to become a billionaire that owns a personal city where you can outlaw them yourself. Otherwise, you're screwed.
Yes, and also plenty without, so that doesn't prove much I'm afraid.
The harder you try to run away from ads, the more you pay to escape them, the harder they'll try to get you to see them and the more they'll pay for it.
Do you mean this literally, and if so can you give an example? Just asking because I've never experienced anything like this. Or I don't know what you mean.
The solution to all this is so obvious; the third party must be removed from the equation.
Local "fee" (ad monetized) prints are horrible. Never used Radio so I can't say anything about that. TV however has become more and more ad cluttered and low quality over the last decades to the point where I completely stopped watching any TV several years ago.
Ads may fit in newspapers and in TV programs. But when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap. Ads don't incentive good content. They incentive click-bait titles, fake news and an anything that maximizes the time an end user waists.
Do you think that they are created to enlighten and entertain you? The model is: get your attention, and mix some ads in with the content. User gets content, advertiser gets customers, publisher makes profit.
The $3 you pay for a newspaper barely covers distribution costs. And they have to be created from scratch and actually printed every day.
High frequency publishing and advertising have always co existed. And the internet is just the latest iteration of high frequency publication.
that's because in digital, google & FB are gobbling up the bulk of advertising budgets, leaving little money in display advertising to be shared by hundreds of media sites. it's not an inherent property of ads that they create clickbait, it's the need for increasingly more ad views.
I watch my movies on Netflix, sports on paid streaming services with little to no ads. The only quality ad supported content I am able to find is on YouTube mainly interviews, podcasts and educational videos. Even then I am supposedly able to pay to not watch the ads (YouTube red wasn't available in my country last time I've checked).
Ads poison the content. People are willing to pay 50-100$ to watch a boxing night. I don't think it's impossible to make them pay for quality content.
Only a very small percentage of users are willing to pay for an online service, that's < 2% usually. It's also very difficult and costly to accept payments for small amounts and do the accounting, sales tax / VAT properly. Ads are comparatively much easier to setup.
they'll prefer to use an adblocker, thank you very much.
ads cause clickbait.
This is not true. Pervasive advertising is far from a natural state of media and is actually an extremely recent innovation.
The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.
While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).
Actually you pay for the ads. There are no companies who "can afford to pay for the ads". Everything they spend on ads is directly included in the price of the product. If you aren't a customer then another customer paid to show you ads. Ads are not for the user they are to maximize profit. It's a trade off for a company they can spend some of the revenue on ads to generate more revenue thus making less profit per item but more overall. They target the optimum which means that several percent of revenue is put in ads. For everyone else this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads or more resource wasting because ads make people buy stuff they don't need.
Ads can also be good for competition: if your upstart product is better or cheaper ads can help you get the word out. Here's a paper that looks at the effect of advertising bans on eyeglasses, and sees that they led to higher prices: https://www.jefftk.com/benham2013.pdf
(Disclosure: I work in ads)
I think there's been some confusion (partly because of Brave's confusing marketing). I didn't even realize there was the pay-the-user-for-ads thing. I was only talking about the micro-payments from users to sites.
The point is so you and everyone else can continue to enjoy free content.
> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.
Brave solves this as well. You can buy BAT instead of earning it by allowing ads. BAT is distributed to content creators with ads on or off.
While I don't think simple flat payments for services and goods is wrong, it's worth noting that it's more regressive than ad-based services: the value of ad impressions is proportional to discretionary income, whereas a flat $10/month is proportionally more for a poor household than a rich one.
Like, try asking poor households whether they'd rather pay $5 or $10/month for various internet services vs seeing the ads they get now, and we both know which option most would choose, for very sensible reasons.
It's "missing the point" because it doesn't fit your personal preferences precisely? There are plenty of people who don't care at all about ads, and there's a full spectrum of attitudes in between them and the hard no-ads position. Brave is targeting people within that spectrum.
The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
I think that is partly because Brave has tied micropayments to something else people care about by putting their system in a privacy-oriented browser.
I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road.
What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often".
This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.
It had too few conversions and many of those were too small (< $5) to make it viable.
Ads are already effortless and fair, they generate cash from your attention in real-time and on-demand. The problem is the overall experience (interruptive formats, high frequency, tracking, etc) which is what Brave is really improving on. Good luck to them.
Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away. Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.
>Also, what mechanism does coil have to prevent a “content creator” from bombarding the end user with ads?
Nothing. Coil is a payment provider for web monetization. It's up to the content creator to provide content in way people want to consume it. A content creator can of course still show ads to user who donate and piss off the user. And the user can of course still block ads or turn off donation for that site (or both). Donation hardly depend on the time you spend on a site. So if you go to a site and its overloaded with ads you simply leave. (The fact that people know that sites get donations if they stay on the site probably has a very positive effect on people behavior)
I’m not sure what you mean… advertisers buy BAT to pay for ads and users get paid a percentage of the ad spend to view the ads if they wish.
Also, when Brave did the ICO for BAT, they raised $35 million in 30 seconds[1]. BAT's current market cap is over $265 million USD.[2]
[1]: https://www.coindesk.com/35-million-30-seconds-token-sale-in...
[2]: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/
- Earn cash from work, pay cash to site as user.
- View ads on site and generate cash for site via attention in real-time.
- View ads from Brave and earn BAT, pay BAT to site as user.
It's a mix between the two models. You're still working via your attention to generate value and trade it for content from the site, it's just inserting 1 more step from the usual ads but with more control over the experience since it's handled by Brave.
(Not sure if the insert-in-website buttons still do ? They were pretty much killed off anyway after Twitter denied them API access 7 years ago...)
• you get a grant of BAT to pay content creators on the web, YouTube, Twitter, etc. when you sign up
• Brave can (optionally) automatically allocates BAT to the content creators you visit the most based on the amount of time you spend on their sites
• you can opt-in if you wish to see ads related to things you're interested in and get paid in BAT
• for BAT you earn, you have the option to pay content creators or cashout to fiat (dollars, euros, yen, etc.)
Right now, Uphold is the gateway between earnings in BAT and fiat, but they're also working on integrating with Coinbase as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/cqjv7a/native_c...
I admit that I would hate to see Flattr become a monopolistic payment platform that knows everything abou the websites you visit... but which also seemed inevitable as they have to determine how much to pay to whom ?
That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money.
This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.
Here is an article about it: https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-much-does-it-cost-buy-...
https://hackernoon.com/wealth-a-new-era-of-economics-ce8acd7...
The gist is that it redefines wealth from "how much people hoard" to "how much people give".
Would enable an ad-free web.
Click this link from Brave: https://webtorrent.io/torrents/big-buck-bunny.torrent (Creative Commons licensed)
Disclaimer: I integrated my WebTorrent library into Brave. Sharing this tip because not enough people know about this feature!
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:02cd53257b68fac90489850be10691df7c42e45a&dn=The+Terminator+%281984%29+1080p+BrRip+x264+-+YIFY&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969&ix=0
"Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. 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."
If you're not accepting money, you don't get to keep it but they give you a buffer of 90 days (which they didn't have to) and if the buffer is exceeded it goes back to the user wallet.
When someone commits fraud, gets caught, shows no contrition, and then takes a little step back so it's no longer obviously fraud, I think the emphasis in that sentence needs to be on "obviously", not "no longer". I wish they'd quit spoofing their User-Agent so it'd be possible to opt out of the new version of this scheme, but they'll only send an accurate header to sites that sign partnership agreements.
To claim it demonstrated intentional fraud rather than poor UX and rewards architecture in an early beta (which was immediately fixed) is simply not credible.
The only funds flowing through the system at that stage were from Brave's own marketing budget through the form of user grants.
The concerns were about theoretical, future issues if Brave ever broke out as a mainstream browser and rewards / payment solution.
Even now, a year after the issue was fixed, it remains to be seen whether Brave's payment system draws in anything more than Brave's own distribution of tokens (through grants and ad rewards to users).
As an early adopter I'm aware of honest, thoughtful criticisms (browser monoculture with Chromium) and... this is not one of them.
You claim I didn't make an honest or thoughtful criticism, but you didn't support that by disputing any of my facts or reasoning, and your only defense of Brave is that they were caught too early to successfully defraud anyone. Whether the money was taken directly from end users or indirectly from speculators in their ICO is irrelevant. They falsely represented themselves to users as site owners and they continue to evade responsibility by falsely representing themselves to site owners as different users. It is tediously prudent to want nothing at all to do with a company that does business through misrepresentation as a standard practice.
[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/4641#issuecomm...
It's hard to overstate how absurd this is as you work through the implications: it means this business model is in conflict with the obvious goal of growing the ecosystem of verified creators as quickly as possible, and assumes incredible ignorance from the Brave team about likely revenue from users unwittingly donating to unverified creators.
The reality is without creators actively pushing their supporters to donate to them via Brave's rewards system the funding flow would largely be Brave 'promoters' pushing creators to use that funding channel.
Instead of this nonsensical explanation it's easy to understand the simple and correct one: Brave had an aggressive growth marketing strategy where they imagined being able to email unverified creators with emails about how much $$$ they could collect from users who had started donating to them, and in doing so accelerate verification of creators.
The stupidity here is that they didn't properly consider that some creators would rightly object to an implication Brave Rewards was an approved donation channel for that creator, which could theoretically risk cannibalising donations that would otherwise go through other channels (that it would likely be a negligible amount doesn't make it any less unethical). Brave did the right thing in fixing it in an early public beta, which is the point of public betas.
Your second criticism about user agent spoofing depends on a fundamental lack of awareness about the whole history of user agent strings, which is basically a story of challenger browsers spoofing the user agent string of the dominant browser within an ecosystem for compatibility reasons [0].
That you attempt to assert that UA spoofing is a nefarious practice (but presumably only for Brave, not for every other browser that does this, such as Chrome for Android which presents as Safari[1]) is yet more evidence of the low credibility of these criticisms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent#User_agent_spoofing
#1 Money was re-distributed if donated and not claimed -> its not frozen infinite.
#2 There was no way to opt out -> its now opt in iirc
Besides that there are other critique points.
#1 Brave is controlling the add economy. They do this by blocking adds and offering their opt in add service(and gain 30% of the add revenue)
#2 Brave is using its own crypto currency to have full control over the money flow.
What additionally lowers their credibility is that they put false advertisement on their website.
This makes me wounder whats the incent to use brave.
with adblockers and google sucking more and more of the advertising pie websites are looking elsewhere for monetization
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. 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.
> Previous versions of the Brave desktop browser worked differently. Until version 0.58.21, released on January 11, 2019, browsers with Brave Rewards enabled would contribute BAT to content creators whether or not they had verified. Brave would then hold contributed funds for those publishers in escrow until they’d verified.
This led to a lot of complaints sent to Brendan Eich and his employees, which they were understandably extremely upset about, but they did eventually drop support for said website.
It does raise an interesting point, though: at what point does BAT funding cross an ethical line? One can imagine even worse things than stalking being funded if there are no checks. But then defunding anything can be seen as a violation of free speech.
Not defending it in anyway. but strategically I feel like Brave should take the money, and just email the creator every 3 months saying you have X amount of money you can claim. Of course, if Brave is just profiting this money that's pretty shitty.
I don't click on links to be advertised to.
But in the case of Brave, they are essentially modifying the producers content without their consent.
To me, Brave is what Firefox should have been. Good UI, good defaults, fast enough, support for Chrome plugins, etc. I am slightly concerned about their future direction though (if they enforce the BAT system down users' throats).
[1] https://community.brave.com/t/why-doesnt-brave-market-share-...
You do if bad products are spending more ad dollars than you. Being good isn't enough to capture the market.
Agree with some of the other users that the tooling around the rewards is still a bit hard to navigate. There's the separate Uphold account, from which I seem to have to manually move BATs around to my browser wallet (?), I'm getting BATs from sources I don't fully understand, I don't think there is a page that just shows the timestamped deltas (debit/credit) etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7l4033/transcri...
I'm using Firefox as my primary browser, though.
So far the site's account has a balance of 258 BAT, which should be worth about $50 USD right now. The "Brave Creators" interface is so bare-bones that I can't figure out what kind of rate that's come in at though. It says that 60.50 of it is from the "Current Period", but I don't know what that means.
Trying to set up the process to actually be able to withdraw the BAT has been annoying and has gotten hung up at multiple points with no indication of how long it'll take until it moves forward. At this point I don't even really think of it as money that I have, because I have no idea how many more steps I need to go through to be able to convert it to actual money, what that process will involve, or how many more fees will be taken on the way.
As your browser receives BAT on the 5th of every month, I think that's also when your Creator account receive tips, but I haven't confirmed that. The UI really is bare-bones and my site doesn't receive enough traffic to speculate further.
It should all be set up now, and the Brave Creators site says that my payout is in the "Reviewing" stage, so we'll see how it goes from this point.
Also loving profile switching which for some reason I never used in Chrome but now use in brave like mad because I have several clients with separate gsuite / google cloud platform environments.
Or can you only be "viewing" one profile at a time?
I'll give it a go on the PC I'm using for work(family) until I upgrade. Free BAT!
Still using Firefox as my daily driver.
I'm not familiar at all with this company and I'd really rather not go giving them data just to earn revenue on my site that Brave has taken away by blocking ads.
Could someone who's more familiar with Upstart assuage my concerns? Are they legit, have they got a good track record?
There are companies that are more established and popular than Brave which do not ask you to hold your ID next to your face and take a selfie in order to withdraw donations to a cryptocurrency wallet.
Not even users can withdraw their tokens without submitting an ID, let alone creators: https://cryptobriefing.com/brave-cash-out-bat/
It's actually worse than PayPal, where you can receive and withdraw money up to a certain amount a year without submitting an ID.
(been using it for an hour now, it is kind of neat)
I'm a happy Brave user but the "Rewards" are a gimmick. I've made a dollar a month at best for clicking their amazon/intel/VPN ads. But the actual browser serves its purpose well as a well supported and actively developed de-Google'd chrome with pretty good ad blocker baked in.
But it's webkit and I like Firefox.
I suppose the other reason is that it's mostly the same thing due to iOS restrictions, but I do like Brave.
Stay away from it.
It remember being force to read about Brave in any article about the web, especially when the click bait title actually mentioned its competition.
Untrustworthy, and not just In their business model.
I also finally got sick of the ads popping up as system notifications, which are far more distracting to me than regular ads, so I disabled that.
I wish Firefox tech was easier to integrate into other browsers, so that we could have a more balanced ecosystem.
I believe if you care to do some research, you'll see that the Brave team has put in the work to be taken seriously.
I get why people are skeptical, especially in this day and age. But the concept for Brave and disrupting the surveillance capitalism known as ad tech goes back to 2013; Brave is not a johnny-come-lately thing[1].
This was started by Brendan Eich, the same guy who created JavaScipt and who started Mozilla which gave us Firefox; it's not like he's someone who doesn't understand how this stuff works.
[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-ze...
Brave is worth a try.
I'm not paid for this (and there is no 'conflict of interest').
it might be that some people are excited that somebody is trying something different on the web
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/braves-privacy-focused-ads-to-spre...
This is likely a large part of why they are losing, I remember showing people how it was possible to create a web browser with a couple clicks and a line or three of code using the IE activeX component in delphi around ~2000. Back then it was possible to do similar things with KHTML.
So instead of a nicely structured project its got layers of crap, even in the build system where you have to dig through python wrappers around automake, etc just to figure out simple things where some options are in one place and others are in another depending on whether they bothered to convert one part of the project or not.
In fact, more often than not the issue is that Brave is blocking too much and breaks some sites. Ironically, this includes the identity verification service (Netverify) used by their wallet partner (Uphold).
Switching to a privacy-centric browser and seeing more ads was unexpected for myself and I would guess other as well.
I'm also not sure I would qualify Brave's ad blocking as "partial". It blocks all 3rd party ads and tracking by default, AFAIK. But it's not as opinionated about 1st party as some other plugins are (presumably to avoid false positives).
Like a site that has popups with "You are unable to view content without Brave browser" ?
To make it work, brave would need to support something extra besides html/js that other browsers don't support.
> On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Some employees of Mozilla Foundation tweeted calls for his resignation, with reference to his donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Some of the activists created an online campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role. On April 3, 2014, Eich resigned as CEO and left Mozilla; in his personal blog, he posted, "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader".
Fair or not, this is exactly what I think every time I read about Brave, and truth be told, also the reason I haven't tried it out.
> This document is draft of a potential specification. It has no official standing of any kind and does not represent the support or consensus of any standards organization. [draft_spec]
It is being discussed on the W3C's Web Incubator forum, which is promising but not an endorsement by the W3C [wicg].
The Firefox addon, which acts as a shim until they can get native support in Firefox, may well be in partnership with Mozilla (I couldn't find anything about it), but the partnership would most likely be in very early stages. When I click on the link you shared to Mozilla addons I get the warning:
> "This is not a Recommended Extension. Make sure you trust it before installing."
It has around 350 users, which includes people who installed the add-on but didn't setup payment.
In summary, the tech is promising but browser support is a long ways down the road.
[caniuse]: https://caniuse.com/#feat=payment-request
[draft_spec]: https://webmonetization.org/specification.html
[wicg]: https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-web-monetization-a-new-...
W3C is a consortium (That's the C in W3C) anyone can join and become a member and join the different work groups to push a new technologies. ILP was originally created by Ripple and got further developed by Coil. Both are members of the W3C. W3C isn't some kind of web-overlord to puts a stamp on things that they like. The consortium creates it they shape it and they approve it. Everyone can participate but the driving force comes from the companies who use these technologies. They are the ones who want to shape it. But as long as a tech isn't widely adopted it will never get the recommendation status. Even HTML5 existed for at lest 6 years before getting recommendation status in 2014 but in 2011 every mayor browser had 95% HTML5 covered already. Getting IPL to a W3C REC is a very long term goal not something people need to wait for to use it.
Nonetheless it should be obvious that this whole tech is at the very start, far form perfect and may or may not change the web as we know it today. Still comparable to the Brave tech and I think it tires to solve the problems instead of re-create different versions of the same problems.
You're right, Coil is a member of the W3C [members]. You're also right that W3C approval isn't necessarily necessary for something to become implemented.
However, when I hear "the W3C is behind ILP" I (and I assume many others) interpret that to mean the W3C as a consortium has taken some step towards creating a standard, or even that the consortium has issued some statement that they hope to do so. I don't think that most people would interpret one of the W3C's 400+ members proposing something and putting it up on a domain they bought as the W3C being behind it.
HTML5 is a great example of how tech becomes implemented and standardized in the modern era. HTML5 exists because Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft agreed on it (through the organization WHATWG) and then implemented it. HTML5 was implemented through an even more centralized process, I wouldn't call getting something pushed through by the major browser members something anyone can do just by putting up a good spec.
I agree completely that a W3C spec isn't something people need before they can use the extension shim, of course. All I meant to respond to was your claim that browsers and the W3C were behind IPL. A company called Coil is behind IPL.
[members]: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
>and also pay are very slim.
Just like with Brave its only a fraction of user who use it. Adoption takes time. The good thing is you can make your website web monetized and people who don't use it will not notice at all.
>and i dont need to paywall my content
As said above you don't need to do this at all.
i was surprised to see people downloading brave ; it's because of the builtin ad blocking - users get a benefit from it