Brave is just an intermediary that replaces ads with other ads. It's an adnetwork delivered as a browser that creates ad inventory on top of the page instead of within it.
That being said, the tokens are basically worthless. This is not what the digital advertising industry wants and Brave is not going to get any decent advertisers with this. They'll end up with the same shady affiliate/performance marketers running CPA ads currently infesting all the 'content recommendation' widgets.
It's different from AllAdvantage with the addition of market mechanisms to correctly price the attention consumed by ads.
That's why users get tokens for viewing, why users can turn the ads off entirely, and why the tokens are tradeable on exchanges. It creates a built-in feedback mechanism. If BAT is priced too low, then everybody will opt out of ads (because it won't be worth it to them), very little BAT will be available on the market, and advertisers will have to bid up the price of BAT to run their ads. If BAT is priced too high, there will be excess ad inventory, no advertisers will buy in, and the price of BAT will fall until it reaches an equilibrium.
AllAdvantage.com failed in a large part because they mispriced the rebates going back to users. They burned through all their VC cash, didn't provide enough value to advertisers, and went out of business. Brave avoids that by letting the market make the pricing decisions.
This is something that couldn't have been done at all before cryptocurrencies, which is what makes this project somewhat interesting.
> It's different from AllAdvantage with the addition of market mechanisms to correctly price the attention consumed by ads.
It doesn't price attention (which cannot be measured) it prices ad deliveries to the user agent. Once a threshold of interest is raced, the incentive to create a discrepancy between the latter and former to make off with BAT for, easentially, free (devaluing actual attention) will either collapse the system or force Brave into all the intrusive measures other vendors who want to try to assure customers that interactions being monitored involve actual human attention have taken in the past.
> Why would advertisers bid higher when this is not the only channel and comes with less targeting and increased fraud potential?
Brave's model - like all ad-supported ones - depends upon them getting very big, enough that they get a substantial fraction of total user attention. They're going for this by blocking all existing ads, which in today's web makes the browser significantly faster and less annoying. They're at about 5.5M users as of January 2019, up from 3M in July 2018. That's still a long way to go, but it's growing fast.
> Why would users opt-in at all to see ads when they're already blocked?
When that becomes a real motivation, it'll collapse the system, because view-fraud will either overwhelm honest views or Brave will be forced to take invasive measures to try to prevent such fraud.
I believe view fraud is exactly what happened to the dotcom-era company that offered to pay users. I recall reading about it in Michael Lewis' book "Panic!"
No wonder Brave is trying to pay people with a useless e-token.
"“A lot of users don’t want to cash out [when they receive BAT],” he added. “It’s not a huge amount of value for most people, so they may prefer to just use it to give back."
In that case, it's just an ad network. Users watch ads, publishers get paid. Only difference is a new middleman and 2 hops for payments.
Also if the money does add up to a sizable amount then it will be overrun by ad fraud.
It's an incentive adnetwork, users are paid for watching (openly) and clicking ads and installing offers (implicitly, because they get more money if they do).
Is it sustainable for advertisers ?
Would you want to pay for visitors forced to click on your ads ?
Users aren't paid for watching, they are paid for the browser loading the advertisements. I promise you that the moment this becomes even remotely profitable, people will be running VPSes with automated browsers (or multiple local instances rendering to a virtual frame buffer, with mice/keyboards simulated to generate clicks).
There is no way around this kind of automation, except perhaps given some pretty invasive rootkitting done my the browser (and that still doesn't mitigate the virtualisation problem).
Given that these things are possible or even pretty easy to do, it is an inescapable fact that this model will fail.
Website based ads stay blocked. The ads you're viewing are built into the browser which removes any privacy concerns because they aren't sending your personal data to any servers. All personal data stay within the browser and remains there forever or until you delete the browser or format your HDD.
There is still a synchronization of how many seconds you watched the ads. I really doubt that these ads will not be directed to users, depending on their preferences. The same thing facebook and google does. If a company comes and will offer millions of dollars to track users, like what kind of ads a specific user / target group is watching, will brave say no ?
I managed to get one or two checks, I tweaked the programs I was running anyway (AIM, mIRC, etc) to have Internet Explorer in the window title, so I got credit when I was doing whatever I was going to do anyway. Sometimes I moved the ad window off screen with LiteStep though :D
And that was probably the lower end of things. On the higher end, users would artificially generate hundreds of fake referrals and auto-surf for them, generating large amounts of referral revenues.
It's another sign that we're heading for 1999 part 2. I remember what the end of the last boom felt like, and I'm definitely getting the same tingly feeling now.
Why is this such a bad thing, though? That's the critical part missing from your post. It seems to me that the idea is to replace unethical opt-out ads with ethical opt-in ads that don't track you.
Besides that, Brave is a browser first, currency layer/ad network second. It doesn't need advertisers. It needs users. The more users it has, the more value there is for advertisers too.
If everyone uses either of your suggested options the publishers go broke and there is no content to view. Brave has a plan for that. So yes, they are farther along than any idea you have presented.
> If everyone uses either of your suggested options the publishers go broke and there is no content to view.
Yay! Then things go back to nerds willing to pay for hosting. Then maybe the internet will go back to being an information resource rather than a machine for monetizing my attention and emotions
I agree that the Internet as we know it is full of content marketing disguised as informational resources, but that's not the Internet's fault. It is the result of the perverse incentives created by a small group of search engines and social media networks.
They render your presence as more or less invisible unless you're constantly spamming your followers with low-content posts and ruining your website with lead-gen focused blog posts.
> If everyone uses either of your suggested options the publishers go broke and there is no content to view.
This is absolute bullshit: people will pay more than they realize for content, and people will produce it for free. One way or another people will consume content. We should all encourage the reduction of useless crap on the internet that exists solely to drive ad views. The faster we all block ads the faster we move past ads.
I suspect if literally everyone on the internet blocked ads today, we would have an extremely short time of excellent free content + paid subscription content before moving to a micro-transaction model.
We haven't yet reached the tipping point where adblock use is so widespread that publishers start bringing ad sales back in-house.
But with each passing year, media companies are implementing ways to be less reliant on digital ad revenue, either via sponsorships, native advertising, conferences etc.
There are three kinds of websites: 1. Valuable websites with ads, 2. Valuable websites without ads, 3. Value-free websites with ads. You assume that the first is dominant, but I find it to be vanishingly rare and therefore embrace the death of ads and thus the end of clickbait and other worthless wastes of space that are only propped up by ads.
There are websites that sell static ad space and don't use third-party tracking tools.
I'm not saying that is the answer, or that Brave/BAT is not the answer. I'm just saying if battery life is what you care about, there are better alternatives.
> I'm just saying if battery life is what you care about, there are better alternatives.
There's no evidence that ad blocking can scale. Seems a bit like suggesting reducing the cost-per-mile by blocking a car's licence plate and skipping out on paying for gas. It's technically an alternative, but not one that can work for everyone.
> If everyone uses either of your suggested options the publishers go broke
While we would lose some valuable content, the unpicking of the advertising monster from the world could only be a positive.
It preys on interpersonal communication and human psychology, and exploits everything good and trustworthy that it can to turn it into more dollars for itself.
Let's move to a post-advertising economy please, by taking back control of our eyeballs.
I use ad blockers because advertising doesn't add anything meaningful to my experience. I don't think there are a lot of ublock users who actually miss seeing ads.
No it's still possible, but doesn't seem viable. Microtransactions have been tried several times. We experimented ourselves. Very hard to get users to pay for something that has always been free, especially when the ads are already blocked.
Correct me if I’m wrong but micro-transactions have never been built into a browser people actually use. How do you figure that they have been tried before in any meaningful way?
It works when "pay the producer" is the default option, and not something you have to opt into. Also helps if you are serving a niche audience rather than a general one.
The Stratechery website charges $10/mo for what is essentially a tech consultant's take on SV company product strategy. This is a narrow niche, and the site isn't one that will get millions of ad views. So there aren't any ads at all, and as a bonus, there aren't any throwaway blog posts designed to be shared on social media.
To be fair, the general cycle is that any ad network/publisher platform tends to get started with the shady affiliate and performance marketing scene, and then as they grow, they gradually get on the radar of more "reputable" advertisers, and eventually costs rise and they begin actively pushing the smaller ones out for brand safety reasons to let them drive up their CPMs for big brands.
Doesn't that only work when the users have no choice (other than the trade for content)? Would you enable ads if all you got was scammy links? How many users would enable to get to that critical mass?
Competing on features and winning in the marketplace can be enough. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Google wasn't the first search engine. People had plenty of choice.
I think Saito (saito.tech) has the better approach. Surely the problem with the Brave model isn't that they are hijacking the browser so much as that they're just replacing who is in the monopolistic position. Better to let anyone in the world setup an advertising network and let anyone receive adverts from anyone else.
I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants.
Anyone who's been involved in the current ad-tech industry knows it's a total tire fire of fraud, technical incompetence and deep hostility to end-users.
Brave's model is very interesting and also a threat to the current ad-tech cesspool, so there should be no surprise to see attempts to misinform people about the model.
Brave doesn't replace ads with other ads.
Brave is a browser first, with an economic layer that will support all sorts of opt-in economic activity in a privacy-respecting way.
The tokens have a market price of more than zero.
Advertisers already include brands like Vimeo and Vice, and many within the ad industry appreciate the model Brave is attempting.
Using on-device machine learning to deliver relevant ads, while at the same time protecting privacy by not sending that data over the wire is a rather brilliant idea.
It certainly remains to be seen what advertisers are convinced to trial this approach, but predictions based on a very wonky understanding of the Brave model aren't particularly interesting.
If you want advertisers, you need to care about what the industry wants. Obviously that's for Brave to deal with, not the users, but showing ads for money is an ad network.
Microtransactions have been tried many times. I spent half a million testing it. Didn't work because of user behavior. And unless users are buying with their own money, it's just converting the BAT they earn from ads into BAT they pay the publisher. This is an ad network.
Even the block-and-replace-ads model has been tried before. Everything from iframes to browser toolbars. Again, this is an ad network.
If you have to use language like "economic layer" to describe your business model, you're either hiding something or you don't have one. Or we can just use the standard definition: brave is a browser-based ad network.
Advertisers have several supply paths to inventory and what gets chosen is a complicated series of decisions. Brave is just not very enticing. Having a large user base isn't useful if there isn't effective delivery and performance. It's always possible to get the low-end performance marketers because they'll buy anything if it works but it won't be good quality.
Also the current trade of content for ads makes sense. When it's opt-in, I fail to see why users would enable ads if they can get the content for free anyway. And if the ads are all low-end spam then I definitely don't see why they would choose them.
It's a very tough 3-way marketplace to bootstrap where the user has all of the control and none of the incentive.
Sure, but folks I know use it because it has other utilities than just block ads (like use less power, for instance) whilst retaining the compatibility that comes with being based on Chromium.
> Also the current trade of content for ads makes sense.
When the rate of folks blocking ads keeps increasing, does it though, in the long run?
> When it's opt-in, I fail to see why users would enable ads if they can get the content for free anyway. And if the ads are all low-end spam then I definitely don't see why they would choose them.
I hope you do realise the number of ifs and buts in your assumptions?
> It's a very tough 3-way marketplace to bootstrap where the user has all of the control and none of the incentive.
I realise that you are intimately familiar with the industry, but it takes a substantial rethink to overhaul something as entrenched as the online ad business.
There's novelty to Brave's approach, I don't think anyone can deny that. Browsers are gateway to the web, equally how Google (homepage) is, and folks are right to take that market on, instead of taking the giants like Facebook and Google at their own game.
I would like to refer you to how telegram has replaced browsers for most folks I know (they literally use it to search memes, videos, photos, links); and how WhatsApp has replaced email. The ads would be where content is. If browsers increasingly act as arbitrators of that content, then they're best placed to monetize it, as well, imo.
It is another matter for folks who simply detest ads, they're not intended users Brave is targeting, but some folks do feel guilt blocking them and wouldn't mind a middle ground. Also, you must realise that a large portion of the internet don't use any form of ad-blockers whatsoever, and when they stumble on Brave (because it is great for battery life and other features), they'd be more than happy to keep seeing ads that aren't all encompassing and privacy respecting, I'm sure.
No, once it has users, advertisers need to advertise in a way which Brave does not manage to block. There are a number of already known methods for that; they are less cost effective than current ad models, but so would be what Brave is offering.
Brave's an open-source, privacy-respecting browser with a digital wallet baked in.
The microtransaction opportunities that are opened up by having such a low-friction economic layer native to the browser is what's particularly interesting about Brave.
Even the criticisms of Brave's microtransaction potential are encouraging, because they're usually unserious, rely on hand-waving references to previous weak and incomparable attempts and appear to emanate from accounts that have an agenda beyond good-faith technical / behavioural evaluation.
I understand the need to incorporate an optional ad network within it, and already see that it's a far superior model compared to the current ad-tech ecosystem that it can and should replace.
It remains to be seen whether it can get commercial traction but considering how quickly and deeply the mood has shifted against Google / Facebook / the current ad-tech ecosystem you'd have to say there has been no better time to trial a new approach to funding content on the web.
Microtransactions are about user behavior, not tech. We had a low-friction experience with a browser extension and that's been possible for several years. Convincing people to value content, judge the price, and spend their own money is the real challenge.
And if people aren't spending their own money then it's just an ad network in the browser to replace an ad network on the page. Not revolutionary and open to all the same concerns of ads today. 99% of people don't notice "privacy", they care about intrusiveness and annoying experiences. That's what's visible so having an ad is the same effect for them regardless of how it's delivered.
If you want to judge my perspective then read this first [1]. It's great to have alternatives and I'm as interested as you to see how this experiment works out.
Microtransactions are about user behaviour and tech.
Your exploratory attempts with a browser plugin do not sound comparable to what Brave is attempting.
Attempting to dismiss Brave by begging the question isn't convincing: "Brave won't succeed and isn't revolutionary if we assume the revolutionary bits won't succeed."
Claiming - after your initial uninformed and dismissive commentary - to now be an honest and good-faith participant is curious.
Innovating on a new utility-scale ad / content model in a multi-sided market with a new browser relying on a new cryptoeconomic infrastructure which if successful threatens huge, well-funded industry participants is certainly a challenge.
But the Brave team are pretty peerless when looking at the needed skillset, the moment in time for an industry-wide shift seems to be here and the mix of incentives: battery life, speed, memory, privacy, user growth pool tokens for donations, future content payment options, on-device learning model, zero-knowledge proof privacy, cross-device syncing etc are very compelling.
Unlike you I use my real name here. I'm honest, straightforward, informed, and will state whatever commentary I want, backed up with over a decade of experience in advertising and tech. Skip the personal jabs and put up an actual argument.
>> Microtransactions are about user behaviour and tech.
Cool. As I said, the tech part is easy and has been solved plenty of times before. What's the solution to user behavior? Brave doesn't have one.
>> Innovating on a new utility-scale ad / content model in a multi-sided market with a new browser relying on a new cryptoeconomic infrastructure
These are buzzwords. Nobody cares. I analyze based on the fundamental principles: An ad network is not new. Microtransactions are not new. Combining them is not new.
Brave claims ads are overrun by middlemen and yet is a just another middleman. BAT is useless in the real world where advertisers and publishers are, and exchanging crypto for currency is more taxes and middlemen.
Brave claims to stop fraud but has no counter. Measuring attention accurately is an unsolved problem and only made harder when it's decentralized and hackable. Ad fraud isn't because of opacity in adtech, it's because of a lack of consequences, something Brave again has no answer for.
If you want to claim you're revolutionary but yet have no new business model, no plan on changing user behavior, and use buzzword-laden descriptions, then yes there's a high chance it's not going to work. Of course anything can happen and I welcome it if it's successful, but I really don't care either way.
You're a competitor heavily invested in the current ad-tech ecosystem casting shade on a competitive model by relying on a bunch of mischaracterisations and false assertions.
Knowing this and re-reading your contributions (and particularly this last one) suggests there's no useful debate to be had here.
That's not an argument. Yet again you post from an anonymous account about my personal character instead of debating the actual points raised.
You're also incorrect because I don't compete with Brave and have no vested interest in adtech. I actually spent time and money on regulation and our marketing SaaS works the same regardless of environment.
Almost all of your comments on this page consist of you telling other people that they are mischaracterizing while offering no clear arguments of your own.
Fundamentally, microtransactions will never work because they make browsing a stack of decisions. It doesn't matter how small the price and seamless the infrastructure, it's still a cost you have to make a conscious decision about. Would you pay one satoshi to load this comment?
The model that could work would be a large network with a single-sign-on ad-free subscription. Charge $20 per month and slice it to the participating sites based on analytics.
This works because it's about eliminating customer risk and burden.
* A large network helps to reduce the "what if I do't read a lot of articles from this publisher every month?" risk.
* Going for an ad-free subscription instead of a paywall subscription reduces the risk of commitment if you can't preview the content.
* A flat monthly fee removes the risk of "what if I get sucked down a rabbit hole and read 500 stories instead of 10 this month" and the burden of having to decide if you're willing to pay for any one individual article.
I don't think anyone would argue that a content payment architecture that demands a user endlessly make a stack of decisions isn't doomed to fail.
But that's a criticism of a specific implementation of microtransactions.
In a future Brave / BAT world where a variety of microtransaction experiments can play out, I'd imagine a bunch of un/successful experiments that then start to gain wider adoption depending on the industry / publisher.
Maybe the transaction is just for specific goods, like ebooks, higher quality video feeds etc, or maybe it's a time spent cost with a standardized market rate up to a maximum amount which reflects a weekly / monthly unlimited subscription.
Attention-based microtransactions are much more feasible with something like BAT + Brave (with its on-device machine-learning model).
Maybe even with everything planned it still fails, but as the experiments haven't even started it'll be interesting to see what, if anything takes.
I have a massive 10-years old block filter and never tolerated ads, but Brave changed this. I think now advertisers can make money off me finally. The majority of brave users will be past ad-blockers, so advertisers can now make some money from this group. I don't want to do anything with the BAT, I just want to see how advertisers respond and see how it progresses. I can't wait to see ads on my phone for once.
> If you want advertisers, you need to care about what the industry wants
No no. If you want advertisers you need to offer a return on investment. That's it. Any rational advertiser is going to pump as much money as has a return into advertising.
Blocking someone's means of income and then telling them they can get some of it back if they change their business model so revenues now flow through you isn't opt-in economic activity. It is extorted economic activity.
You're lumping all publishers together. Brave blocks static banner ads whether they track you or not - whether they're served by an ad network or not. Whether it's delivered by a for-profit or non-profit.
It's much faster is one big reason. For instance I tend to have quite a lot of tabs/windows open at any given time and generally do not shut down my computer or close my windows. And Firefox starts to crawl in this scenario both in terms of very poor performance as well as its countless memory leaks. Brave works fine without needing regular restarts.
But really I think one of the coolest features is one click per-site configuration of scripts/cookies/fingerprinting. For instance most paywalls that have pop-in paywalls to try to 'tease' the user rely on scripts. This paywall is now removed by clicking the lion icon (in the top right) and then clicking on scripts blocked. And this is automatically then saved per site.
Another neat little feature is similar one-click functionality for single-instance Tor windows. Imagine a site is geoblocked, blocked by your government, or you'd simply like to see what a site would return from another country or with no information at all on you. You can right click on a link and select 'Open link in private window with Tor', and you can then similarly change identities with a single click. Awesome stuff.
All this said, I think the GP comment is correct. I'm attracted to Brave because of these sorts of features and I will never once enable ads, even if I'm paid to do so. In my, perhaps eccentric, opinion I think ads are psychologically harmful at scale. Everybody thinks they are not affected by ads, yet look at consumer behavior at large and we've become incredibly irrational market actors. And companies continue to pump out trillions of dollars on ad spending. One of these groups is right, and I think it's clear which one. As such, I'm not arrogant enough to believe myself immune to such effect, so yeah - no thanks.
I'm posting this from Firefox mobile with both ublock origin and umatrix active. It's wonderful. I hear people say that the scroll mechanics are weird, but I've never noticed that. I've also heard a claim that it's slower, which I couldn't comment on.
My understanding is they’ve been taking money “on behalf of creators” who never signed up and pocketing it. That’s reason enough for me to not use the product. Sounds like it could be construed as fraud. Eich got pretty defensive on Twitter and this whole thing came up here before too [2].
An earlier version of the browser let early adopter users direct where Brave's own marketing budget of BAT tokens was sent to, including sites that hadn't yet signed up.
If those sites didn't sign up, the tokens would eventually go back into the marketing budget pool of tokens, to be distributed to other sites (not to Brave).
That's very different to the mischaraterisation you mention above, but no surprise as Brave's model is a threat to the current fraudulent ad tech ecosystem.
They did make changes to the product immediately after that episode though. Now if you want to donate to a site that hasn't registered your browser will try for a period of time, and if the publisher doesn't sign up the tokens are returned to you to distribute elsewhere.
The mischaraterization, which you seem determined to double-down on, was an attempt to paint Brave as a fraudulent company trying to build a 'patreon for thieves'.
Any honest onlooker doing the barest of research would understand the absurdity of the claim, but the amplification of that mischaracterisation was (and is) clearly aimed at herd programming to try to suppress Brave's growth.
I can see how you might view it that way. On the other hand, let's say Chrome started replacing all non-Adsense ads on every site you visited with Adsense ads -- without notifying the webmaster no less. Then, if the content creator decided they'd like their cut of the revenue, they had to sign up for Adsense. And if they didn't, Google would just pocket it 90 days later. I don't think you'd be as sympathetic to Google in this situation? Would the courts? Just because it's a small up-start business, or just because it's crypto related, doesn't make it exempt from fair dealing.
I'm not saying its a Patreon for thieves, and that doesn't make what they did less unsavory IMO.
Your scenario doesn't reflect how Brave's model works at all - it just reflects various misconceptions on your part.
Brave does not replace publisher ads with their own.
Brave does not block first party ads. Google's search ads display. Facebook's ads display. Twitter's ads display.
Brave does block other ads by default, and as a user agent, it's reflecting the valid, ethical choices of the user not to load the untrustworthy content and scripts from these poorly-coded, user-hostile third party ad networks.
If a user opts-in to Brave's ad ecosystem, then they've also made a decision about what content funding model they want to support.
There are many browsers out there, but till now there's really only been one privacy-invading ad model.
Now we have not just another browser, but another ad model which respects privacy, and after all we've learned about the current ad-tech ecosystem I'd prioritise user agency over all other considerations.
If the primacy of user agency begins to take hold, then the market will adapt and survive and even thrive within this new model.
> Brave does not replace publisher ads with their own.
It absolutely both blocks (many) pre-existing ads and places its own ads. Those are both overt features of the browser.
> If a user opts-in to Brave's ad ecosystem, then they've also made a decision about what content funding model they want to support.
It's not really a content funding model, since whether Brave shows (and derives revenue) for ads or not (and whether it blocks the ads the content supplier has decided to place or not) has nothing to do with any agreement or payment to the content source; it's a browser funding model.
The content funding model it (indirectly) promotes is the covert “organic” advertising model, where rather than being separated and distinguished from the editorial content, the promotional content is integrated with and inseperable from the organic content.
All ads are blocked automatically without publisher consent. The only ads available are from Brave. Therefore the only way a publisher can get money from ads is from Brave swapping ads.
So I guess if you want to be technical, Brave either swaps with nothing or with their own ads.
I've been following brave since the Tom Scott thing blew up. The whole thing seems like a disingenuous cash grab or a (slowish) pump and dump crypto scheme. There are quite a few zealous defenders of BAT and Brave that always turn up in threads like these that you have to question why these people are so willing to look past what seem like obvious flaws in the product.
Anyway, on reddit the user with the same name has deleted their account but this one is still active and active in the BAT / Brave subreddits. [0]
Full disclosure: I came to root against Brave after seeing how Tom Scott was treated and how that whole debacle went. I don’t even work in Tech so really, I shouldn’t care.
If your product has to be opt-out to have a chance of success, then it's a failure from day one.
What's wrong with how they treated him? I thought they fixed everything pretty well.
And they did make it opt-in for receiving 'real' tokens, as far as I can tell from the last few minutes of searching. The UGP tokens can still be sent at people that didn't opt-in, but those are more like coupon codes than money. Users can only get them for free, and they have an expiration date.
Actually a comparatively recent version of the browser made all sorts of claims about "Help support this site by donating!", accompanied by pictures of the producer harvested from the site, looking very much like they had a relationship with the producer and were collecting on their behalf.
They only backed down when one of the content producers who had no relationship with them and did not want a relationship with them cried foul.
>That's very different to the mischaraterisation you mention above, but no surprise as Brave's model is a threat to the current fraudulent ad tech ecosystem.
This alone is enough of an inflammatory and conspiratorial statement that I have a hard time taking you seriously. It's a bad look to cry "shill" in the face of fair criticism.
The Block had to correct multiple errors in their reporting, including wrong numbers about the structure of the BAT sale that were checkable and should have been checked on etherscan.io. We made two changes and got Tom Scott's blessing in the end:
"A final update on the thread about Brave: they're now opt-in for creators! While it's still possible to tip folks who haven't opted in, the data is stored in-browser and the UI has been clarified. These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!"
Your [2] reference has nothing to do with me. That's not my handle. If we err, we'll fix the error when it is pointed out clearly. If we are attacked with misinformation, we'll defend. Same as you'd want to do if roles were reversed.
former user of their product. originally presented to me as a chrome alternative with the ad-block built right into the browser itself and not as a javascript extension. But as the product has evolved, they've changed in ways to monetize it themselves. While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them. As a bonus, they're throwing you back a bone to put up with their new business model. Brave has inserted itself as a new middleman between the advertisers and web users.
> They're betting that advertisers will be willing to pay more to reach people who opt in to be reached.
But the whole reason “pay for ad-free experience” model isn't dominant is that advertisers, in fact, are willing to pay more for exactly the people that would pay the most to opt out of ads (because those are the people with the most money), not pay more for the people who would opt in to ads. So the premise is known to be the opposite of the truth.
article says that they will eventually pass revenue to publishers. So currently they will take the ad revenue from publishers and keep it for themselves? Seems pretty shitty. There are sites I choose to support and this seems to remove that possibility even if they are serving clean ads.
Don't know if things changed recently. But back when I checked Brave out the idea was that they would only replace ads for publishers that opt-in to this, and the user would also need to opt in to be shown these. And then the revenue is split among publisher, brave and user.
This is all 100% up to the user. Brave simply blocks all ads by default. If the user chooses they can disable ad blocking, including on a per site basis. The user can also, if they choose to do so, display 'cleaned' ads. So you have three tiers of options:
- no ads
- native ads
- cleaned ads
It's totally up to the user to choose what they want.
There's a lot of negativity here about brave. But the fact is that the web desperately needs a new financial model, and as far as I can tell brave is a lot further along on that than any other project.
Would anyone like to argue that the present web financial model is fine? Or would anyone like to point to someone else who has an alternative that would be workable and is anywhere near usable?
And let met add one more point. Any workable alternative is not going to be perfect, so the fact one is not is not, at least alone, a reason to not use it.
But again, let me ask all the brave critiques, what is your alternative? And by that I mean that can be used by your average user, not something only a techy can make work.
I don’t agree that the web needs any financial model at all. Content creators want a financial model and advertisers wants to continue to be in business, but neither of those desires indicates a “need” for a single financial model for the web.
No, content creators don't want a financial model, they need one. If they don't get money from creating content they have to spend their time doing something else. And today they get that model from the centralized advertising model. Until someone comes up with a different financial model, that is where they will stay.
Before the centralized advertising model, the web existed and had content. There are ways that people get paid without advertising, including donations and premium content subscriptions.
The mother of a friend of mine lives in a low cost of living area and makes her entire living from writing gay BSDM anime fan fiction. She has more than 1k monthly subscribers, no ads.
The problem is, do I really want to pay $1/week for that New York Times subscription if I only read articles from them once every 3 weeks? And the funny thing is, the inconvenience of subscribing is actually more of a deterrent to me than the money itself.
If they publish a good article, I'd like to see them get paid for it so they can make more good articles, but I'd also not like to be mined for data. I also don't want to be inconvenienced trying to subscribe, because it is completely impractical to keep track of hundreds of individual subscriptions.
Not sure why everyone is so negative about this here but it seems like a very useful idea.
"Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible."
So people can pay to buy tokens but can't sell them, seems legit.
You can buy and sell them on exchanges like Coinbase. It'd probably be a bad idea for Brave to get into the cryptocurrency exchange business - it's a tricky business, and it's not their core competency.
BAT activity for user rewards etc happens off-chain at the moment, but I think the plan is to move it all on-chain when Ethereum can support that level of activity.
A user model is built on-device to allow for opt-in targeted ads, but that model does not leak across the wire.
Because the user model is not bound by a security sandbox, it can build a much richer model of user behaviour than even the most invasive ad-tech solutions that exist right now.
So Brave claims end-users get more relevant, targeted ads and more privacy, because this model can't be accessed off-device.
It sounds good in theory, and now ads are live we'll get to see how true it is in practice.
Re first question: That is correct. BAT is trackable as are all Ethereum tokens. But Ethereum 2.0 is planned to allow much more powerful privacy features, so it's not clear what choices BAT will make when the option is available.
Unfortunately, MLMs are legal, and since a service is being done for pay (ads count as a 'service') then this is probably legit.
But I thought the point of Brave was to pay content authors. Wouldn't a simpler and more consistent solution be to make it so that if a viewer received a payment for viewing ads (man that is hard to type) that the money is held in escrow until they pay it out to a site the user has visited?]
That's the basic setup of the Brave browser. You get shown a few Brave ads every so often and you can automatically "tip" sites by setting your preferences. It's kind of like Spotify where whatever you "earn" during a month gets distributed based on the amount of time you spend on a site. You can also not tip anyone but the Brave tokens expire after a while for the end-user if not used. This is just my understanding from using the Brave browser. I should note that I'm working for a startup in this space that is pursuing a different model but I support any and all efforts to put the Internet economy back in the hands of creators and average people.
I think what Brave is doing might be misunderstood: it seems like a brilliant take on the current problem facing content creators... I think of Brave as trying to reach a common ground-- help content creators make a profit, put the consumers out of the current dragnet misery. That said, there might still be opportunities for different (not necessarily controversy-free) solutions, like the ones that are set in motion:
- Net Neutrality violating deals by ISPs/BigTech.
- Users forced to install apps (in a bid to escape the browsers).
- Native advertising, where ads are indistinguishable from actual content.
...and so on. Is Brave's model any worse [0]? For better or for worse, things will continue to change.
[0] IIRC, they have more than 10M installs. I reckon, if they hit 100M or so, they'd be fatal to the ad-networks. I don't see any other tech today wielding that kind of threat? Adblockers might have higher installation numbers, but they don't solve the problems for the content creators, so they are not really the solution to this mess we are in, imo.
I have been using the brave browser for a few months now. I think the concept is great, and possibly one of the best uses for crypto currency. In my case I want to disable ads entirely and use the auto-pay system to pay publishers directly when I read their content. It also has a "tip" button so you can send extra with one click if you really like the content.
Edit: There seems to be a ton of negative comments in this thread from people who have never actually used the Brave Browser. I would encourage anyone who is interested to actually install it and try it. The ads section is completely opt-in. The "auto-contribute" and "tips" features can be used without the ads. I feel the "auto-contribute" and "tips" features are what would really appeal to most HN readers.
This seems like one of those ideas that's great in theory but not in practice. I don't care about paying or even being paid when browsing the web...I just want to be left alone.
Also this particular implementation is rather shady.
I frequently find myself confronted by paywalls and demands that I turn off my ad blocker. I can usually find a way around it, but things would be so much simpler if I could just click a button to pay the site a fraction of a penny.
That’s a neat idea. Could be a YC startup idea. A subscription service that gives you access to all the paywall content let’s say 10/month for 50 articles and you don’t even click a button just read. Rather than seperate paywalls, ads etc.
I remember getting on their beta list 3 years ago. Seems like they're still in beta...that cannot be a good sign.
From what I remember, they're a closed platform. One must use their apps to get access to full article content. That's a nice solution for their partners, but not for the broader web (85%+ of the websites you stumble across that are not TIME, NYT, Economist, etc).
Blendle is a nice experiment, but I wouldn't consider it a solution to the problem being discussed here.
So, let me get this straight. If I set up an old computer in the corner and script it to just meander around the web 24/7 using Brave, I can rack up a ton of useless BAT tokens/currency/whatever?
Yes, you can do that. It seems like the vast majority of other people on here have absolutely no clue what they're talking about because they've never used the browser. I have used it about 2 weeks now. Every 15 minutes or so a popup ad shows up which you click to get some brave tokens. It isn't much though. I figure if you botted it 24/7 you would get around 50 cents to 1.50 per day. Probably better stuff to do to make money these days IMO.
The economics, fraud analysis, requirement to go through KYC / AML hoops to extract and convert to fiat would mean it's not a viable mechanism to enrich yourself.
Most people are sold on Brave due to privacy / speed / battery life.
Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term.
I only use and recommend Brave now, but have no intention of turning on ads.
> Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term.
People have tried microtransactions in lieu of ads, many, many times over the past decade. Hardly any users are interested, and those that aren't don't want to pay enough to keep the lights on at the websites they are visiting.
This is an idea that's incredibly popular in techie circles, and falls flat on its face with the rest of the world (Along with 'floss twice a day', 'just run your own mailserver', 'manually updating my OS/browser/dogsitting app is better, because I can control what runs on my computer', and 'compile all the software you run from source'.)
Integrating a digital wallet into a browser elevates money to a first-class citizen on the web.
That changes everything about microtransactions.
I now have one location to top up and manage my wallet and can effortlessly pay for content across the web in a consistent, familiar way.
The historical approach of endlessly getting out a plastic card and typing private information into a multitude of different forms will seem terribly old-fashioned.
Was Flooz a browser or just a digital currency? 1999 was a very different time as well for the internet. In particular, ads and trackers were not even remotely as pervasive and invasive.
I don't think that this kind of thing is the solution, but when I click on a link on HN, in a browser with no blockers installed, and I see this - https://ibb.co/jhDfC5k I can't help but believe the web is broken, and we need some sort of fix.
I hate ads as much as any reasonable person, but I don't think this is an example of the web being broken. Wired is a magazine, it shouldn't be at all surprising that they would try to monetize their content. They have the right to be as obnoxious as they like about it.
What's broken is the model of advertising on the web, the unregulated cesspool of greed, malware, tracking and dark patterns that led the public to inevitably reject ads wholesale as soon as it became widely known that it was possible to do so, and easy to implement.
It's business and corporate interests that have to find a way to survive on the web, but the web itself will be fine with or without them.
I find these kind of bait-and-switches to be really tasteless. Company X is created originally with the sole purpose of blocking ads and privacy trackers - and then decides to monetize using some kind of "good" ad. (I'm looking at you, AdBlock Plus.)
This has always been Brave's monetization strategy. And it's also completely opt-in. By default the software simply blocks ads, runs incredibly performant, and has a large number of built in privacy respecting features which can be toggled on a per site basis (scripts, tracking, etc). If the user wants to see native ads, they can. If they want to see 'cleaned ads, they can. If they want to see no ads, they can.
There's no bait and switch here. Ads are opt-in and for many of us aren't the most interesting aspect of baking a digital wallet right into the browser.
This idea is very interesting. It reminds me of how YouTube shares their ad revenue with content creators, and that in turn grows YouTube's network and business.
Similarly, the act of web browsing is content creation. It's data creation. Very valuable data.
If users are currently blocking ads in their power, why not entice them back by allowing them to make an appropriate amount of money from the data that only they have the power to give to others? 'Sell your data.'
The more one browsed or shared of their data, the more one would get paid. It's simple business.
It sounds like a model that would bring diversity to the economy.
I started using Brave a few weeks ago. Not because of privacy concerns - mainly out of curiosity.
One thing I did NOT expect is the noticeably faster performance. (Presumably due to the lack of ad content loading.)
This is a big deal at my house. We turned off wired Internet service to save money during a job search. (There's only one HS vendor in our neighborhood. (And this is in Austin. Go figure.) We're tethering our phones and foregoing any high-bandwidth use cases.
According to the article, Eich will pay you in a "cryptocurrency" which cannot be exchanged for cash.
> Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.
> Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.
I'm confused by this statement - there are currently several exchanges you can use to trade BAT for USD. Is this suggesting that the UI will be made more clear in the future, or are users actually blocked from withdrawing BAT from their wallet?
Right now Brave require a creator account to be linked to Uphold which automatically exchange BAT to USD (at a 1.95% fee). Uphold balance can also be withdraw to a bank account in the US or to other cryptocurrency.
I remember simpler times of the Web 1.0 age when Epinions would just mail me a check every few months. Outside of the reviews I wrote on their website, I didn't have to lift a finger to get paid.
Brave Browser on Android has been my goto since 2017. It's the Chrome browser, but with an adblocker, which obviously the main Chrome app doesn't support.
That said, I really don't like this scheme. Paying users with a worthless e-coin while putting your own ads on top of blocked ads? Why would site owners opt in to this? So they can monitor 2 different ad systems present on their site?
Not to mention, the conversion probability of a user who blocks ads is much lower than that of someone who sees ads daily. So how much would you really be earning by serving ads to people who specifically downloaded an adblocking browser?
Thanks for pointing that out. I actually use uBlock Origin as well myself. I prefer Chromium because it supports hardware acceleration on Linux, which Firefox doesn't consider to be important enough (even though they pride themselves on open source).
I'm a fan of Brave's mission, and the browser itself is great (basically Chromium but faster), but the practice of hiding publisher's ads but showing their own, which may or may not end up compensating the publisher, seems fairly unethical.
I think a couple things would make it less objectionable and more awesome:
1. don't block verifiably "clean" ads by default, which basically means lightweight, no JavaScript, etc. Something like AMP for ads. If a publisher wants to show their own ads, given them a reasonable way to do so without buying into the whole centralized Brave/BAT system.
2. don't allow users to keep the money they "earn" from viewing the replacement ads. Ideally hold it in an escrow smart contract that automatically sends it to a charity if the publisher doesn't claim it after a certain amount of time.
3. come up with a way for publishers to easily allow users to pay per-article. I don't pay for a WSJ subscription but occasionally I want to read an article. Let me easily pay, say, $0.25 per article, otherwise I'll continue to find ways around your paywall.
To acquire BAT at scale fraudulently from rewards will likely cost more than it's worth, and to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis.
I don't think they've published anything on fraud analysis, but what their research team has published is indicative of the calibre of Brave's team: https://brave.com/research/
As with everything, automating this at scale is very difficult because you'll need residential IP addresses. So unless you have access to a massive bot net, good luck.
> to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis.
Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? Otherwise I'm not sure what keeps people from withdrawing and trading on whatever sketchy exchange they want.
Quite a few people on here advocating fraud and talking about their friends committing fraud in their youth. Don't the software developers here make enough money?
Are you worried he's making your browser Catholic? I've met him, he's a great guy. Just because you might disagree with his political views doesn't mean you should choose your browser based on that difference.
Not sure how to respond to this. For many gay and lesbian men and women (including myself) Brendan Eich's donation to support Prop 8 was a very clear message. I'm perfectly happy to choose a browser that isn't developed by a man who thinks I shouldn't have the same right to marry as he does.
I said a few years ago that Brave wasn't going anywhere, and it isn't. It's not because Brendan Eich donated to Prop 8 either. The vast majority of the large, liquid market of browser users simply don't care about privacy.
No, I'm worried about the guy whose language has been horribly implemented into ever major browser and allows sites to do just about anything on my computer and gives away all kind of telemetry data without my permission. Sacrificing users' privacy has become the norm due to JavaScript, and I believe it was created primarily for that purpose.
> ... allows sites to do just about anything on my computer
You don't seem to understand how Javascript actually works. It can do just about nothing on your computer. It can't read any data off disk (that the site itself didn't create). It can't read data from other websites, unless the website operator enabled that (in which case it could read that data with just URLs, no scripting required). It can't write data anywhere except into specific storage files. Besides HTTP requests, it can't access any other process, service or resource without asking you for permissions.
Telemetry is something that can be done without Javascript. I can just make any link you activate have some sort of unique ID. Maybe Javascript can make it a bit more detailed, but fundamentally nothing changes.
I'm still waiting for Brendan Eich to apologize for donating $1k to the campaign to to pass Prop 8 which held up same sex marriage in California for five years.
Brave got to where it is because Brendan Eich is the face of it.
Everything I've seen about the browser seems tied to him, and generally his interactions with people seem testy and confrontational.
It's ironic that Google owns the browser and ad network. Brave wants to change that by creating a new browser and ad network. But until they can make brave less tied to him it'll be hard.
I stand by that I wrote 100%. He is a polarizing figure and that is impacting Brave. The early adopters they need care about this facet of the founder. If you don't recall his financial support of that controversial anti-gay ballot measure in California, you are either being ignorant or dishonest, I'm saying the people they need to adopt Brave care about this, not just me.
Full disclosure: I'm working on an alternative to Brave in the crypto space. But I'm not shilling it here.
But speaking about disclosure. What I find interesting about discussions of Brave are that many people chime in here without specifying their positions. I don't have BAT nor shorts on them. Do you have positions, do you own BAT or have a financial interest in their success?
>Our value add is free speech. A free speech browser. With a free speech app store. With free speech money. (Bitcoin.) We don’t care about saving advertising. We care about saving free expression. Fundamental difference. Fundamental USP.
Edit: Not talking about anyone's politics here, I'm talking about Brave's focus on advertising - not end user's freedom.
We don't care about "advertising" as an end in itself, only as one means among two (the other is anonymous user payments) to the end of keeping creators funded and the Web alive as a viable economy. What's more, there's no way for us to make money with Brave Ads unless users opt in -- in which case they make >= what we make. Last thing: don't let someone use "free speech" as a confidence trick. Read the privacy policy.
I don't really think JavaScript has done all that much, except made it easier to advertisers/hackers to do nefarious things on users computers with a very poor permission model. In fact, it is prob the #1 used language to limit expression in other countries and track/spy on users. Mozilla wasn't founded by Eich.
You can do tracking perfectly fine without Javascript using just plain old cookies and links. Javascript can't really do anything nefarious "on the users computer" (outside the browser). You can monitor detailed clicks and perhaps steal some data from the origin (which is developer error), that's about it.
The security implications of Javascript are always exaggerated, few people talk about how buggy CSS and HTML parsers or image/video decoding can be. Lots of zeroday exploits there and they keep coming.
That being said, the tokens are basically worthless. This is not what the digital advertising industry wants and Brave is not going to get any decent advertisers with this. They'll end up with the same shady affiliate/performance marketers running CPA ads currently infesting all the 'content recommendation' widgets.