261–270 of 649 posts
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Hey, remember OTA television? That is also a free medium. Where did this notion come from?
And you have the freedom to block/skip ads from your TV, too.
>If you don't want to provide free content then stop publishing on the web, a free medium.
How would that not also apply to television?
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The Brave approach seems to be the same as the infamous Adblock Plus, i.e. insert themselves as a middle-man between websites & ad networks on the one side and the user on the other and under the guise of "ethical ad blocking" extract a ransom.
The difference with Brave is they also provide a mechanism to contribute those earned funds to sites you visit directly.
In any case, Brave's effective CPM that they pay out to publishers it complete shit even compared to bottom-of-the-barrel ad exchanges. It's objectively a bad deal for publishers.
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I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I f…
I think that's why they went with a cryptocurrency for payment. Brave isn't a middleman, or at least there's no technical reason why they have to be. Users pay publishers directly, using tokens that they earn from Brave in exchange for viewing ads.
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I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I f…
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Brave Ads are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn't strike me as an "escalation of hostility" when you compare against the cur…
GP is on track to become my highest rated comment on HN, which suggests more people agree with me about this than anything else I've said here. There are some of us that think the distraction economy is making the world a worse place. OS notifications have a higher participation rate than side-bar ads because 1) nobody has learned to tune them out, and 2) theoretically speaking, these are the things we opted not to f…
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I think this largely ignores "how" ads are distributed. The website you are looking at did not select _any_ of the ads you see. They chose a network who is delegating that placement to someone else. Depending on which ad network, this could delegated by several different ad networks until an advertiser is finally selected by the final intermediary. In principle this may not be a very important distinction. However, I…
> The website you are looking at did not select _any_ of the ads you see. That's irrelevant. In general the content creator gets to choose how their content gets monetized. They own the copyright after all. That ads blocking isn't considered yet a copyright violation in the court of law probably has to do with the upsides, like protecting against malware and privacy. But blocking ads for commercial reasons, like Brav…
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You had me... > Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. and then you lost me. Hitting people with notifications is an escalation of ad hostility, not a reduction.
Brave Ads are opt-in, and user-configurable. You decide whether or not to participate, and to what degree (1 to 5 ads per hour). These ads are surfaced as OS notifications, which means they respect settings like Do Not Disturb, Focus Mode, etc. And, as always, you receive 70% of the ad revenue for your participation. Respectfully, that doesn't strike me as an "escalation of hostility" when you compare against the cur…
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But the ecosystem around dollars is so parasite-riddled that if you tried to move cents for each ad you didn't see, you'd end up paying more in transaction fees than would make it to the content creators that you're trying to support. The dollar has a scalability problem that BAT doesn't. Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
The creators end up getting a crapto token at the end of it and then have to wait a long time to accumulate enough to justify the time, hassle and transaction fees to turn it back into actual money they can spend on beer/rent/etc. All for some tiny fraction of the browser market. Meanwhile people are living off Patreon and other services like it.
The same would be true for actual dollars... you would have to wait for it to get high enough to justify the transaction fees but also the service time. Most service won't let you take it out until your cash reach an high limit. With a concurrency, at worse you can keep using it in other alternative ways (at a bare minimum, on your web browsing in this case).
Fuck ads. Fuck tracking. Fuck making me part of your 'audience'. There has to be a better way. I'm going with blocking until there is a better answer. Brave may be a step in the right direction but its not the solution.
About their Ad program - money are very small yet, for both: site owners & users.