lukemulks

You've managed to bring better results than the leading private search engine, with a 1-person operation.

You're a giant. Sad to see Runnaroo dim the lights, but appreciate the experience had with it over the past year!

Glad it was helpful.

(Brave employee here) We block 3rd party ads and tracking, that collect user data, often without their knowledge or consent. Brave Ads are disabled by default, to ensure that no one sees ads that is not interested in viewing ads. This provides a benefit to advertisers as well, as they currently dump a lot of money into a dumpster fire, and are basically tasked with measuring how many of the pixels appeared on the screen for a certain amount of time. Brands don't know if people that viewed the ad were interested in advertising. People get shotgunned with ads. We're approaching this differently.

We've introduced advertising that is private by default, with a new approach to measuring and accounting for ad event confirmations through our ad confirmation protocol.

We have some information regarding the confirmation protocol here, for those interested. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Security-and-pri...

Aside from providing advertising that's private by default, our ad platform includes people in the process, by rewarding them for their attention (70% of the rev share for the ads viewed). People can then contribute those tokens to publishers and creators (like Wikipedia), or hold the tokens. In the future, people will be able to redeem tokens for gift cards, premium content, etc.

We'll be introducing additional ad units in the future for publishers, with a cleaner deal and better rev share than they currently receive (publishers will receive 70% of the revenue, people will receive 15%, Brave will receive 15%).

If we were just replacing publisher ads with other ads from the existing ad ecosystem, I'd understand and agree with the sentiment. That said, we're bringing new methods for ad delivery, accounting and matching to the market, all designed to function without leaking your information from your device. Hope this helps.

(Brave employee) The BAT is used for more than contributions. The token has a distinct use case as the unit of account for attention and services on the platform.

https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#representation

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)

There are a few pieces to this (I work at Brave and am on the BAT project).

The BAT project has set aside 300M BATs in the User Growth Pool, which will be used to award users that opt-in to the BAT integration with BATs.

Amounts in the user growth pool, including the address, are listed in the BAT FAQ: https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq.html

We also released a post on the user growth pool and extending the BAT Platform beyond the Brave browser, which is continued in the roadmap: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...

The existing Brave Payments beta that uses bitcoin will be migrated to BAT as the roadmap indicates (https://basicattentiontoken.org/bat-roadmap-1-0.html), which will initiate flow for users that choose to opt-in and contribute to verified publishers.

We've posted about this here: https://basicattentiontoken.org/bat-a-natural-way-to-contrib...

The post above also contains a review of the Google Contributor reboot, which filters ads in exchange for micropayments for participating publishers.

As communicated in the roadmap, trials will initially be with ads in private user channels (separate from the current blanner blindness problems that exist - I worked in ad ops and product integration for 5 years prior to joining Brave last Dec - blanner blindness is a problem). Examples: rich push notifications, private tabs, new tab page.

In later phases, verified publishers will be included in the rev share, with additional options for premium content and ala carte content available for BAT for publishers interested in the utility.

That said, verified publishers will be included earlier in the process through the microdonation/patreon option mentioned above.

Brave is not forcing anyone to pay for anything (I work at Brave and on the BAT project).

Brave is, and will be free to use.

BAT will be opt-in, and users will not be required to pay for anything.

Users that opt-in when BAT ads become integrated will be awarded BAT from the user growth pool (user growth pool is 300m BATs).

Users that opt-in and wish to remain anonymous do not have to KYC.

Users that choose to exchange BATs for fiat or remove BAT from the system will have to go through KYC if they setup a new wallet as a part of the opt-in.

Again, Brave is not forcing anyone to pay to browse. Brave will continue to block ads and tracking by default, for free. BAT will be integrated and opt-in.

BAT FAQ: https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq.html

BAT blog: User adoption and extending the BAT Platform https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...

BAT white paper: https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...