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I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

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Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale. Their revenue stream is still ad monetization, just it happens that it does not come from Google (although it is curious that on default settings, Brave's ad blocker does not block Google ads?).

And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.

Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.

> Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale

> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them

No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.

> Brave doesn’t show a single ad unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.

I have what looks like a promotion for Crypto.com, Binance, Gemini and FTX.us in Brave browser, on default settings even though I never turned them on. For few of these I never heard and I certainly do not have any interest in crypto. Not sure why these would even belong in a web browser on default settings unless there is some kind of a deal/partnership going on?

Both Google and Brave have the same business model. They make money when a user clicks on an ad.

The execution may differ and maybe only because Brave is still new and relatively small and did not feel the same kind of shareholder pressure Google withstood for the last 20 years. That is why I said, imagine a world in which Brave "won". It would not be the same company it is now (compare Google from 2000 to Google today).

Fair enough, I’ve edited my comment (I haven’t used Brave besides ~2 hours of trial months ago — I won’t use any Chromium browser more than that when I can help it — but that’s no excuse to leave misinformation up). Still, those promotions are more in line with the ones that Firefox is filled with (Pocket, Google and Amazon search, etc.), not really the same type of thing as Google’s banners and youtube autoplay videos, and AIUI they only track the referral source (Brave) not the individual user (a defining distinction IMO).

Brave has at least two kinds of ads at present: Sponsored new tab page backgrounds, and user-controlled mechanism that delivers ads as toaster popups. The sponsored backgrounds are on by default, the popups are not. The toaster popups have a revenue share thing where Brave gives a cut of its ad profits to users so they can use Brave's tipping service to benefit creators.

Brave Talk and Brave News are ad-funded as well but I haven't tried them so it's hard to say.

Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

Ad-hijacking?

The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned off by default.

Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.

I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT.

Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior.

It is still a cool model, but very much ad-tech and ad-based.

Of course they're not against ad tech, they are an ad agency. They just think there's a market for a privacy-respecting setup, is all. And I think they're right in that.

As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.

> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.

This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.

I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.

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