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The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

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Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#141

Post by nostrademons »

manigandham wrote: post #127
nostrademons wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 av…

Why would advertisers bid higher when this is not the only channel and comes with less targeting and increased fraud potential? Why would users opt-in at all to see ads when they're already blocked? There seems to be missing component of why both sides want to interact through the Brave network.

> 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?

Because they get money for it.

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#142

Post by tlrobinson »

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.

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#143

Post by rjf72 »

hnaccy wrote: post #62
justsee wrote: post #47

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…

>I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants. Why would I use Brave over a modified Firefox install?

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.

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#144

Post by [deleted] »

justsee wrote: post #47

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#146

Post by rjf72 »

skellera wrote: post #13
winningcontinue wrote: post #4

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 pu…

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.

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.

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#147

Post by everdev »

manigandham wrote: post #23

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…

More than that, it's just a Chrome browser with Ad Block by default.

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#148

Post by drb91 »

manigandham wrote: post #23

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…

I was under the impression you could also pay the content producer directly to bypass ads, which is IMHO the ideal solution. Is this no longer viable?

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#149

Post by xrd »

ralphstodomingo wrote: post #136
trevelyan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shouldn't you make a disclaimer you're part of their team?

Is this true?

Re: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

#150

Post by drb91 »

atomical wrote: post #72
RandomBacon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the battery life of Brave comapred to Chrome with an ad-blocker ? How about the more privacy-respecting Firefox with an ad-blocker ?

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.

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.

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