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.