Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 229 posts

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

#171

Post by manigandham »

shostack wrote: post #139
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…

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?

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

#172

Post by manigandham »

peteretep wrote: post #170
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…

> 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.

Yes. I just disagree that Brave will deliver users that provide a return. Ads are opt-in, payment models are undefined, and verification is lacking.

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

#173

Post by dragonwriter »

nostrademons wrote: post #141
manigandham wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because they get money for it.

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.

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

#174

Post by dragonwriter »

nostrademons wrote: post #125
sbarre wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was tried during the first dot-com boom as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage

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…

> 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.

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

#175

Post by manigandham »

justsee wrote: post #163
manigandham wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This has been a consistent dishonest mischaracterisation: that Brave literally swaps a publisher's own ads with their own. That functionality is on the roadmap, but Brave has stated that will only occur with publisher consent . Keep an eye out for accounts that try to push this mischaracterisation and see if they're linked to the existing ad tech industry...

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.

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

#176

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> Once it has users then advertisers need Brave.

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.

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

#177

Post by dragonwriter »

jsloss wrote: post #59
ChrisCinelli wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised if they do not make "opt out", not "opt in".

It's opt in. That's the angle. They're betting that advertisers will be willing to pay more to reach people who opt in to be reached.

> 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.

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

#178

Post by Tsubasachan »

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…

Replacing ads with other ads. Genius.

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.

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

#180

Post by hexane360 »

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.

Google doesn't have to replace publisher's ads with their own. They could just replace them with ads going through their market.
Post reply on HN