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Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

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Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#61

Post by jonathansampson »

jayd16 wrote: post #49
jonathansampson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave developer here. Great question! Brave Ads are entirely opt-in, and work via on-device machine-learning. The machine-learning bits study your browsing habits in a private, non-leaky manner. Once a day, your device downloads an aggregate catalog of many ad options to be studied locally. If/when an ad is found that fits your interests (as inferred by your browsing habits), the ad is displayed as an OS notification…

So it has to download every possible ad (to mask my identity/preference)?

Catalogs are regional, so you aren't downloading every possible ad. You're downloading a ~3MB or so file that has ads for your region. Others in your region download the same catalog, which prevents fingerprinting.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#63

Post by jonathansampson »

seren wrote: post #31
jonathansampson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave developer here. Great question! Brave Ads are entirely opt-in, and work via on-device machine-learning. The machine-learning bits study your browsing habits in a private, non-leaky manner. Once a day, your device downloads an aggregate catalog of many ad options to be studied locally. If/when an ad is found that fits your interests (as inferred by your browsing habits), the ad is displayed as an OS notification…

Thanks for chiming in. So from the FAQ : https://brave.com/faq/#all-ads-blocked > Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user’s preferences and intent signals to prevent “fingerprinting” the user by a possibly unique set of tags. It means that advertisers still get some feedback on the "intent signals" of the users that have seen their ads ? So it is private in the sense you cannot be un…

Not quite, I think that FAQ item needs to be updated. The model works like this:

The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests.

On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance.

If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet.

At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc.

The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online.

Brave aims to keep your data private, and on-device. It is never leaked to us, or anybody else. You are sovereign over your data, and you decide with whom it is shared. That's our goal, always.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#64

Post by basch »

bsclifton wrote: post #28
zargon wrote: post #12

I really like what Brave is doing. I wish it was built on Firefox instead of Chromium. I just don't see myself leaving Firefox without major upheaval in the browser space.

(Brave employee here) Curious: what are some of the shortfalls you see in Chromium? Before I joined Brave, the desktop browser was originally using Gecko (from Firefox). Ultimately, there were some problems and the decision was made to move to Chromium. On iOS, Brave is forked from Firefox though You can check out more detail on Reddit where folks asked why FF was not used (which has links to more detailed info): htt…

being firefox on iOS is somewhat irrelevant to the rendering engine discussion tho, because iOS is forcing webkit on all its browsers, firefox is just a chrome around webkit.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#65

Post by jonathansampson »

hobofan wrote: post #36
jonathansampson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Once a user opts-in, machine-learning bits on the user's device take over and begin to study browsing habits and interests. These ML bits then decide what types of ads are likely to be of interest to the user. What are your scaling concerns? I'd love to hear more!

I would assume that once a lot of advertisers are on the platform the ad catalogue can quickly grow to the size of GBs, which would be unfeasible to hold on smartphones.

Catalogs are regional, and reflect only active campaigns. So far, the file hovers around 3 MB when compressed. We are able to optimize size even further, as needed. It will always remain small enough to be downloaded easily.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#66

Post by songshuu »

trpc wrote: post #55
jonathansampson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave isn't a theme to Chromium. We've made numerous changes to the underlying bits to strip out (or modify) anything that is not aligned with our principles of user-first, private and secure by default, and "Can't be evil." Before Brave, users were already installing ad and tracker blockers in large numbers. By 2015 over 600 million devices were blocking. This is the result of an entire set of technologies evolving…

Please don't speak as if you give a single damn about publishers. """Your""" adblocking system blocks the ads that publishers get revenue from, you're simply saying, YOU CAN ONLY MAKE MONEY THROUGH US. WITH OUR VIRTUAL WORTHLESS CRYPTOCURRENCY. With enough users, your worthless cryptocurrency won't become worthless anymore. The entire business model is disgusting and should be illegal to be honest.You're rebranding a…

Lame. There's literally youtube channels popping out videos for how to pi-hole https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBXTnrD_Zs4

At least with Brave there is some hope of getting value back to the content creators.

Unless you'd rather paywall all the content?

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#67

Post by jonathansampson »

drngdds wrote: post #48
songshuu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eye roll on this take. If you have a better business model for content producers on the internet feel free to build it.

Patreon already exists

Have you looked at their fees lately? You can expect to see as much as 12% of the value go to Patreon. Further, you have to give them personal information about yourself to play ball. Brave has a 5% fee on contributions, and we hope to reduce that even further as the system grows. Secondly, you enjoy anonymity in our system. Not even Brave knows to whom you're offering support.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#68

Post by basch »

songshuu wrote: post #56
dymk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not just that, they’ve moved/are moving to a model of displaying their own ads instead, which are invariably for some scammy crypto-of-the-day which even FB and Google ban from their ad platforms

That's simply false. They don't do ad replacement. You have to volunteer yourself to receive ads and they come in like system notifications, not anywhere near the content.

thats a bit of semantics. if they block someone elses ads, and display their own ads they are still replacing what a persons attention is drawn to, even if it is an overlay instead of injected into the page. (its literally called an attention token, diverting attention to a new target.)

should they be allowed to create an ad driven piece of software? absolutely? but if that software is an ad blocking browser, its creating a new interesting gray area.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#69

Post by dymk »

jonathansampson wrote: post #53
dymk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not just that, they’ve moved/are moving to a model of displaying their own ads instead, which are invariably for some scammy crypto-of-the-day which even FB and Google ban from their ad platforms

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Brave has 2 ad-models (one still in the works). First, the User Model. In this model, user's must first opt-in to participate. If/when they do, advertisements are shown (at a user-controllable rate) as OS notifications. When a notification is shown, 70% of the revenue is deposited into the user's wallet. The second model is the Publisher Model; this is in the works now. U…

We'll see how long that lasts once the VC money runs out.

Blocking ads and displaying your own certainly is an "ad replacement" model though, and websites that don't want to participate have no choice.

Re: Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher

#70

Post by lukemulks »

hobofan wrote: post #36
jonathansampson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Once a user opts-in, machine-learning bits on the user's device take over and begin to study browsing habits and interests. These ML bits then decide what types of ads are likely to be of interest to the user. What are your scaling concerns? I'd love to hear more!

I would assume that once a lot of advertisers are on the platform the ad catalogue can quickly grow to the size of GBs, which would be unfeasible to hold on smartphones.

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)

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