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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

#151

Post by rjf72 »

turdnagel wrote: post #52

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.

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

#153

Post by hakfoo »

manigandham wrote: post #106
justsee wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incomp…

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 t…

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.

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

#154

Post by justsee »

manigandham wrote: post #126
justsee wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-f…

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? Bra…

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.

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

#155

Post by eredengrin »

drngdds wrote: post #103
woodandsteel wrote: post #50

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…

Here's a crazy new financial model for you: make things and sell them for money. Snark aside, independent artists already do this with Patreon and digital music services.

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.

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

#156

Post by anonymous5133 »

Lowkeyloki wrote: post #18

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.

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

#157

Post by justsee »

hakfoo wrote: post #153
manigandham wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 part…

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.

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

#158

Post by anonymous5133 »

justsee wrote: post #28
TwoNineA wrote: post #3

Can't wait until someone automates it.

I'd say good luck with that. 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/resear…

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.

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

#159

Post by manigandham »

justsee wrote: post #138
albedoa wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your scenario doesn't reflect how Brave's model works at all Because he didn't exclude first-party ads? That's what you consider to be not reflective "at all"? Just pretend he said "all non-Adsense third-party ads" and then educate us against whatever additional misconceptions you perceive him and us to hold.

Because Brave does not replace publisher ads with their own.

They literally do. They remove ads on the page. Then they show their own ads to the user.

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

#160

Post by manigandham »

PudgePacket wrote: post #80
manigandham wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publishe…

Brave doesn't need advertisers though, it needs users. Once it has users then advertisers need Brave. I don't see how Brave has to win over advertisers at all, they'll come around when Brave can offer some non-insignificant amount of money to them.

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.

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