Brave launches self-serve ads program | Hacker News Reader

Brave launches self-serve ads program

brave.com

113 pointsjarsin96 comments

I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all.

I'm perpetually on the edge of doing this but I haven't because I want

- a way for sites to transparently "cite their sources" so that, for instance, the field-work guy gets paid, not just the writer.

- more granular control over auto-contribute (implicit 1×, with a button to tweak to 5× or 0×)

- community curation so if I 0× a site for being shady about how it got my attention, people who trust me will have it at 0× automatically

- links to community 0×'ed and 5×'ed sites appear in different colors to cue trustworthyness before I even click links to them

> I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all.

This sounds like a desirable group of features, but might this tread a bit too closely to making Brave a money-transmission service and put them under the scrutiny of far more complex regulations?

If I go to a restaurant and leave separate tips for the bartender vs waitstaff, is the restaurant now a money transmission service?

That's a payment to the restaurant, and is counted with the employee's normal pay. Or if you personally hand cash to people it becomes a personal gift.

The situation is more analogous to patreon: a centralized service which you make bulk payments to, and they divvy the payment to your selected set of people who are not employees of patreon.

Brave is starting a centralized service where you make bulk payments to them, and they divvy up the payment to your selected set of sites who are not employed by brave

> Brave is starting ...

I think the situation you describe is how brave has worked for many years now. Just fund your wallet and enable auto-contribute and it'll happen. Whether that's legal or not, I dunno.

My point is that however legal it is is unchanged if you give users more control over how much goes where and let them curate such settings for each other.

> This sounds like a desirable group of features, but might this tread a bit too closely to making Brave a money-transmission service and put them under the scrutiny of far more complex regulations?

If it can be made clear that you're paying for content you're consuming, that might waive it to an extent? Who knows.

Sounds like a tax nightmare since you'd need to keep track of your cost basis and calculate your profit and loss on every time your browser made a payment on your behalf.

You mean like so?

> Loss: 1 BAT

> Profit: viewed a website

Surely its only when you change one currency for another, right? I enjoyed a banana earlier today and didn't have to pay capital gains on its ripeness...

A banana is not a security, so the IRS does not care about the banana gaining value due to ripeness.

Most cryptocurrency tokens are.

If you buy a banana by selling some penny stocks, then you have to take notes on that sale to be able to pay taxes correctly.

The parent commenter is claiming that, due to how cryptocurrencies are currently regulated, viewing websites would automatically trigger selling a "penny stock" like thing (a security), which is an event the IRS cares about.

Ah, well that's kind of dumb but you've described the dumb thing clearly, thank you.

You need to track all of your crypto purchases and sales for your tax return, but you knew that already :)

Apple News (the paid version) is, by far, the market leader at this. I find it pretty frustrating. I’d much rather support independent journalists, etc.

It’s a terrible model, directly rewards click bait and attention grabbing crap vs. selectively paying for good stuff. Substack is much better and the quality available there reflects it.

Substack is also going the Medium way though. Ever more popups and other marketing crap. Soon it will be unusable like Medium has become.

The incentives are different.

Substack writers retain their audience (via email lists). The Substack changes are about helping their writers get more reach.

Medium was all about commoditization of writers for their own (imo crappy) brand in pursuit of ads. Totally different.

They have no choice but to maintain focus on advertising. That's the whole schtick. Without it there is no product.

I think the primary innovation is that they can distribute money in a way that is analogous to how attention is distributed. Getting that money from their ad business strikes me as a temporary necessary evil. I hope that the long term plan is to get people to recognize that a non-ad-funded-web is a better web so that we just pre-load our BAT wallets with $10 each month with the idea that it'll gradually go to the content creators as we browse.

It's a bit of a leap from where we are today, but if anybody can make a culture shift like that happen, it's the content creators united behind a common cause. They're influential by definition.

Also, in a soon-to-be-dominated-by-LLM's web, I think a steady trickle of BAT contributions to your site might be a reasonable component in a scheme that suggests to you that I'm a human user. Sure, bot makers can fake such a history, but it would be expensive for them to do so at scale. Hopefully something ZK something can be done to allow for this in a way that doesn't require me to also make my browsing habits public.

I mean... their could ask people to pay for a quality product that protects their privacy and keeps ads out of their faces.

You know, the old fashioned concept of making a product worth paying for and asking people to pay for it. And... I know this one is going to be even more controversial, use real money instead of inserting crypto into the mix for no good reason.

How much would you pay for a lifetime and/or annual subscription? I am only asking because I've been trying to figure it out for myself. Would I pay 100 and expect zero telemetry, tracking, healthsheck, studies, etc? That would be unrealistic, imho.

Then again, I am not exactly a visionary, or an expert

I wouldn't pay $100 all to Brave, but I'd pay $100 and let Brave keep $30 if I had reason to believe that the other $70 was making it into the right hands.

Why is that? Capitalism forces them?

That's the thing, isn't it? The people who want this will only use a 100% product, not a 50% one, so there's no way to bootstrap to it.

Brave is not so brave after all. It merely swaps other people’s ads for its own, like a thief in the night. A trick as old as AdBlock Plus.

1. Brave's ads are opt-in. So you don't see any by default.

2. They are not the same as other ads, because they preserve your privacy.

3. Brave is taking on Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world, so we get a better internet. I'm not sure about you. In my books that's pretty brave.

4. You're dumping on other people's hard work in a fly-by comment that takes seconds to write. How are you being brave? What is your contribution to a better internet?

5. Say you want to create an alternative browser to take power away from Google. It costs many millions of dollars per year to pay for the development. How will you pay for this, if not also with the help of ads?

Sorry I tried brave once and never looked back but I am wondering... why would I Opt in for ads that I specifically got a browser to remove?

Brave ads, if you opt in, are displayed as system popups, not in the browser. You opt in so that you get a reward - BAT token - for seeing those ads. These rewards you gain are later distributed to all the content creators, according to how long and how often you visit their websites.

Here's an idea. Why not implement an ad tab that combines search with ads. So you can search for ads. It would be like a micro-store, or one of those old mail-order catalogs. Or those late-night infomercials that took over a whole channel for a few hours after 2am, when regular programmes ended. If I am looking for a new phone, i can browse the ads first. If that fails I can go elsewhere.

I just think that the concept of intruding into my frame, via embedded ads or notifications, is distraction I simply do not ever want.

> I just think that the concept of intruding into my frame, via embedded ads or notifications, is distraction I simply do not ever want.

And thats why in Brave ads are opt-in rather than opt-out.

But I would still never opt into interruptions or notifications on the terms of an advert.

Parent already answered that, perhaps you think the ad ecosystem is better served by multiple players not just the FB and google duopoly.

Or you want to support a small upstart.

Or you don’t mind ads but you do mind the tracking. So brave is way better.

> 4. You're dumping on other people's hard work in a fly-by comment that takes seconds to write. How are you being brave? What is your contribution to a better internet?

Criticizing things that claim to improve the internet but arguably do not

I'd say the fact that brave has 50M users is a pretty strong sign that it is an improvement.

To quote a great comedian, "Let's eat shit! Billions of flies cannot be wrong!”

I really care a lot more about not seeing ads than some privacy paranoia. I'm really not that interesting.

So what if the need for ads was fundamentally eliminated, would that interest you? Instead of hacking together add-ons and playing cat and mouse, perhaps we could use a model where you fill a wallet, and then the contents of that wallet get automatically distributed based on which websites you spend the most time on while also eliminating ads? Sounds pretty good to me, the people who are okay with ads can keep them in a privacy respecting way, the people who don't can fund the difference from their own pockets.

Not that Brave is quite there yet, but it seems to be one of the few efforts that might actually have some small chance of getting there. The building blocks are slowly coming into place for it.

No, because micropayments SUCK. DO not make me consider every website visit as a financial transaction! Is this page worth 5 cents to me? I don't know, but I know that THINKING about it is absolutely not a worthwhile use of my mental resouces.

So most advertisers steal your attention without permission and now Brave comes and steals their stealing of your attention. I don't think there are any good actors here.

Yes, the content creators who aim to make a living through advertising lose out. But personally it's not a business model I want to support either, and if Brave goes some way to proving that it's an unsustainable business model with bad actors all the way down then I'm actually fine with that.

Let's be real here, content creators are far from pure and are playing the game of attention stealing just as much as everyone else here (with a few notable exceptions). The vast majority of them are trying to game the SEO system for their own ends, not love of producing content. All the SEO spam you get with you try to research something on Google, that's the reality of modern ad supported content creation.

Ublock Origin for the win. Block every shit that gets in the way.

I completely agree. It feels very dirty. You take away the source of income for the creators to earn an extra dollar for yourself.

s/to earn an extra dollar for yourself/to fund your project, in a privacy-preserving way, to make the internet a better place/.

So it’s okay to take away the creators income and replace it with your own just because your project “makes the internet a better place” whatever that subjective tagline means?

The criticism is well deserved imo. It’s a sleazy move from Brave.

Is it not sleazy that ad networks track us everywhere we go?

How many impressions would you need to cover even a $20 monthly hosting bill, never mind feed yourself or pay rent?

Out of genuine curiosity, I decided to run a few numbers to really find out what it would take for ads alone to support a website and the single developer (no family, no debts, just rent, food, utilities, and hosting).

Hosting: $20/month Rent: $800/month (single room studio, if lucky enough to find one) Food: $200/month (likely should be higher due to recent inflation) Utilities: $150/month Total: $1370/month

Typical PPM (Price Per Mille) for ads: $6/1000 ads = $0.006

$1370/$0.006 = ~228,333 ad impressions per month.

You could reduce the number of required visitors by shoving more ads into the page (3 or more), but even with 3 ad impressions per visit, you'd still need about 76,166 visits each month. That's over 7,600 visits every single day!

Not sure why Brave gets attention on HN at all. Their sketchy business model was clear many years ago, see the intro post from 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10938593

What to you is sketchy about the business model? The fact that it is also based on ads?

The reason it feels sketchy to me is that they first block the ads, but then insert their own ads onto the websites. Thus they try to force web publishers to use their services if they want to make any money from showing ads on their site.

> insert their own ads onto the websites

This is very persistent misinformation. Brave used to modify search results pages to insert their referal code, which was scummy as hell and thankfully they went back on that decision and pretended it was an accident (I can't see how that could possibly be done by accident.) Referall codes are not exactly 'ads' though, and other than that, Brave hasn't inserted their own shit into webpages. The ads which Brave displays are in a separate window, not inserted into web pages.

Anyway, just stick to Firefox. The perceived "need" to use a Chromium browser is a Google psyop. Firefox works fine, and if it takes a few minutes off my laptop's battery life.. who fucking cares. Not me.

They did more than that at the beginning, their original business model was something like "user pays us X, directly or by looking at ads, and we distribute that X to the sites they visit”, effectively inserting themselves in the ad chain by force.

They've since changed that model 15378382 times, every time denying that there was a problem with the previous versions, so I stopped caring.

I mean I get it: it's a very hard problem to fund a browser that is user-centric, and all solutions found as of today suck in one way or another. Mozilla does it by leveraging Google's need for a fig leaf when talking to authorities about monopolistic behavior. Vivaldi does it by selling pageview counts or something like that. Etc etc. I just wish companies were more honest about it.

> effectively inserting themselves in the ad chain by force.

For values of "insert into the ad chain"* that did NOT mean inserting ads into webpages. They never did that, it is persistent misinformation. I'm beginning to think it is deliberate misinformation.

Unfortunately we don't have many stable candidates based on Chromium and without the Google shit. Brave is still Open Source as of today, so community action can happen at any point.

Is this really like a thief in the night? I would suggest that it is nothing like a thief in the night.

I will never understand the hype behind Brave. Why would I watch ads that give Brave a cut of the money, instead of watching ads that actually benefit the content I'm looking at?

Their ads are supposedly more privacy preserving, and also have some crypto mumbo jumbo involved

Many use it as a stable Chromium build that is not Google Chrome and turn off all Brave features. There is no alternative that blocks ads and syncs on all platforms.

On which platforms you can't get firefox or did you mean chromium specifically?

Because only one gets them VC money from crypto fomo.

I use Brave because it runs on all my devices, block ads by default and it's sync feature works great. I don't really touch any of their BAT features

OSS Chromeium browser + builtin adblock

Its for when you need chrome but dont want chrome

I've never understood the built-in adblock argument, it takes like 30 seconds to download uBlock origin (which I personally trust more anyway).

Or a browser which forces you to update whether you want to or not

I wonder if this will result in more diversity of ads, or more of the same. As a Brave user, the concept of automatically supporting websites and creators is interesting, but I don’t like seeing scammy crypto/web3 ads so I disabled them before long.

My intuition is that it will not change. I feel like there are two classes of people who use Brave:

1. Hype driven people who crypto ads work well on.

2. Privacy driven tech people who are pretty much non-monetizable.

Self-service ads are useful for small to medium-sized advertisers who want to target specific niches with pinpoint accuracy. If Brave's whole thing is that they protect your privacy from targeted ads, and also they lack the scale to be useful for non-generic ads, then I'm not sure any of this makes sense.

Why do you think privacy driven tech people are non monetizable? There's a whole hardware industry around built them for devices with audit trails and etc.

If you are privacy driven tech person (class 2) you won't use brave at all.

As a privacy driven tech person, I find brave to be semi cringe yet at the same time one of the few companies that is actually trying to innovate on an approachable set of mainstream, privacy focused tools, a web browser, search, and a (more) privacy preserving ads platform for the web.

I don’t like everything that they do, but I respect the fact that they are actually trying things.

Saying flat out that a privacy driven tech person wouldn’t use brave at all is reflective of the counterproductive discourse within the community, where every tool in existence fails someone’s purity test. Firefox, ddg, protonmail, etc have all had their scandals.

Tor for private browsing is a neat feature too. Obviously if you are doing stuff where tor is actually needed, you should be using a dedicated browser, but for 'I don't want to be put on a list' stuff it works great.

I initially had good fun with brave and BAT, but the continual rug-pulling and changing the rules re: account verification, exchanges you can use, regions, with getting the "earned" BAT has made me give up as a big waste of time. Still a good security oriented browser, and I'm using it for that, just all the BAT/advertising stuff is not worth your time unless you like continually getting messed around with bureaucratic nonsense.

and yes, I'm aware some of this may be driven by regulatory stuff outside of the brave browser peoples control.

plus the exchanges they force you to use have had security issues, leaking my email out in a breach - whats the point of self custody cryptocurrency if BRAVE force me to provide my private ID information to insecure third parties?

> security oriented browser

Is it actually though? Can you name one security vulnerability that Chrome had that Brave did not?

Chrome shows ads.

I like Brave's Defaults (har har) in a lot of places but I am firmly against their monetisation schemes.

There is an attitude among a lot of people in the founder space that "subscription models are what everyone says they want - but no one actually pays up".

This is demonstrably false. Plenty of content creators are making modest but sustainable incomes via Patreon, even despite the skew towards the top 2% of creators.

I think what the phrasing should be is, "I could make a modest income via the subscription model, but a notably higher income via other methods. Because this is my primary means of evaluating an approach, I therefore consider the subscription model unviable, assuming maximal competition."

That would at least be more defensible if one could justify their concern that their sector is high-competition.

Previously:

> Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.c...

> This warning is prompted by a company called Brave, who've been taking cryptocurrency donations "for me", using my name and photo, without my consent. I asked them not to, and to refund anyone who's donated; they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible".

> I did ask Brave how keeping profiles on untold numbers of people and assigning donations to them without consent complied with GDPR, at which point the person talking to me stopped replying to emails.

Well, I mean, threatening legal action is going to result in silence from any even marginally competent company.

This is old and no longer relevant. The new system is people can still donate to anyone, even people not registered as creators. The donated BAT sits around for a while so the person has time to register and receive the donations if they so choose. After so many days, if they do not accept, your BAT is automatically returned to you.

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Patreon give you the full value proposition of Brave while actually delivering on the promises. Stop promoting this scum.

You seem to have a lot of hate for this browser, I'm interested to know why (for real, I am not being argumentative). I decided to give it a shot and I am enjoying it so far.

I'm really surprised they are still pushing this BAT stuff. Who is willingly going to look at ads?

At least make it possible to do it with money instead.

I do, but you are not forced to look at ads, you can just turn it off. Also you can do it with money if you want.

Unrelated, but my Brave Creators account was suspended 6 months ago. At least I think it was suspended 6 months ago, I only received a confirmation a few days ago because I asked.

No specific reason given, apparently there's no way to appeal, and my sites are still shown as "verified" even though I can't access my account. Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while?

I've praised them a few times here before, but the way they're handling this is just bad.

> Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while?

This is the same company that took (takes?) donations for people who aren't signed up at all, so I wouldn't count on it.

Apparently donations are returned to the sender after a while if the website/account owner doesn't claim it. The problem is that my sites are verified... are they keeping the money? No idea.

I've asked them 5 days ago to remove/unverify the sites if they plan to keep my account suspended. No reply so far.

Update: They've replied. My sites/accounts are no longer verified.

If someone from Brave reads this, perhaps verified sites/accounts should be removed when a Creators account is suspended?

Oh brave. Still fast on mobile but every day the cursed triangle of crypto in the corner nudges me a little further away.

You can disable it in the settings :)

Another entirely earnest and enthusiastic step towards the "future" presented here:

https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF

Reply on news.ycombinator.com