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Brave launches 1.0

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Re: Brave launches 1.0

#361

Post by djsumdog »

the_duke wrote: post #96
have_faith wrote: post #30

If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of…

I'm skeptical of the model too, and have no intention of using Brave. But: you can also not enable ads and buy BATs yourself. This gives you a single system to distribute donations to content you enjoy. Which is actually quite an interesting concept, since it is low effort/automatic for the user and yet allows small contributions. Of course it also gives Brave a potentially huge position of power, which is my biggest…

> If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit

Wasn't that the concept behind Flattr (minus the non-profit)

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#362

Post by SamBam »

Drakim wrote: post #52
bilbo0s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month) What if a user doesn't earn 10 BAT a month browsing? It seems like that system would break down over time.

You aren't really meant to have a "system" of earning and spending BAT that balances each month. The budget of BAT you set each month comes from your wallet, and is essentially your personal donation to the various websites you use, it's not related to ads. This wallet can run out in the same way any wallet can run out, and you'd have to refill it. The BAT you can earn from seeing ads is separate and unrelated to tha…

> The BAT you can earn from seeing ads is separate and unrelated to that. Maybe it goes into the same wallet but that's not important.

I would guess that the vast majority of people would prefer to see their BAT go up when they viewed ads, and down when they paid content creators, and have no more interaction than that. To the viewer, it would be monopoly money, but they'd be happy because advertisers would essentially be paying creators.

The idea that I'd have to actually put my credit card number in somewhere, and think of it as my donations, and advertisers paying me... that's a whole different mindset and has a lot more friction.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#363

Post by marvindanig »

Awesome work, Brave!

We use Brave internally for all our development work and are also a Brave Certified book publisher for the web [1][2]. Please tip us to support the books we publish if you are a Brave user too!

I can vouch for the quality of browsing experience and speed that we have had in the past two years. One of the best features of Brave, which led me to set the browser as our default, is on a shortcut `Command + Option + N`. This shortcut opens a private window using Tor which is super useful, handy, fast and most importantly private. :-)

[1] https://bubblin.io

[2] https://creators.brave.com/

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#364

Post by [deleted] »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #267
jonathansampson wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I already decided my Ad participation. I block ads, and want the advertising industry to die. This does not seem like a value add to me.

[deleted]

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#365

Post by SamBam »

bsclifton wrote: post #275
lern_too_spel wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tokens only go to verified publishers. Signing up to receive them is basically that consent. Otherwise (site or channel not verified), the transaction never leaves the user's browser wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process

"I blocked your source of revenue, now I'm holding some money which you can either sign up to receive a fraction of, or don't and you won't get any" doesn't sound like "consent" to me.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#366

Post by buboard »

jamiequint wrote: post #336
buboard wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is to nudge advertisers and publishers towards a more transparent model without middlemen. Unethical is what's happening today, with middlemen making obscene profits. It's more like civil disobedience than unethical.

Middlemen are not ipso facto unethical. The publishers have voluntarily opted-in to ad exchanges because those exchanges provide value by aggregating demand in a way that would be difficult for all but the largest publishers to do themselves (and the largest publishers do, which is why FB/Google/Snap/Twitter/etc all sell their own ads). It's not as if anyone is forcing publishers to not deal directly with buyers. The…

e.g. when facebook took the page followers that people worked to acquire, and made them pay for users who intently subscribed to them, that was undestandable from a revenue-generating side, but unethical. Also when google forces people to pay the google tax.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#367

Post by jimmydorry »

mkl wrote: post #332
bsclifton wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tokens get set aside (tracked only in the user's browser) but nothing happens until you verify on https://creators.brave.com/ Once you verify, the tokens will leave the user's wallet and are put into a wallet (called a card) with Brave partner Uphold. If you want to convert the tokens to your local currency and put into your account, there's a "Know Your Customer" process that the government makes sure is enforce…

> there's a "Know Your Customer" process that the government makes sure is enforced Which government, the US one? Who is the customer here, the person being paid?

All first world countries and many others with developed financial systems put laws in-place on their financial institutions (like banks) and all money transmitters. They are required to get specific licenses and one of the key parts of these various licenses is "Knowing Your Customer". The intent is to prevent money laundering. Essentially, governments regulate these financial institutions and require them to know who exactly they are dealing with (sometimes there is a minimum amount that is interesting for them, other governments require it for everyone regardless of value).

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#368

Post by jamiequint »

buboard wrote: post #360
jamiequint wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website Huh? This is trivially easy with DFP or if you're smaller AdGlare/AdZerk/etc > You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. This is objectively false. OpenX, Amazon, Rubicon, AppNexus, Pubmatic, etc all pay better than Google for large pockets of inventory. Google has the largest distribution, but their CPMs are awful for a v…

setup DFP and find advertisers where? The ad networks you mention either exclude 95% of websites or pay worse than adsense for long-tail websites. You can find testimonials about them in tons of sites

You're absolutely right that they aren't a feasible option for long-tail sites (as you mention, most of the time you won't even get approved). However, long-tail sites don't monetize poorly because Google is screwing them. Long-tail sites monetize poorly because because the value of the content on long-tail sites isn't worth the Trust & Safety overhead for anyone except for Google.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#369

Post by mk89 »

nvrspyx wrote: post #136
hombre_fatal wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? Are you serious? Ad-blocking by default is a core part of the marketing and self-description. I'm actually amazed they replace ads instead of just "uBlock"-ing them. Sounds like a joke. Look at the copy on https://brave.com/ and https://brave.com/download/ Are you telling me the average person reads "blocks ads" and expects it to mean "we replace ads with our own"?

Viewing Brave ads is opt-in, not opt-out. However, they do nag you a bit about it. There's an icon for Brave Rewards in the address bar with a "1" badge asking if you'd like to opt-in (Toggle in Settings to hide this icon). It also asks you during setup and then if you skip (no Deny, Disagree, etc.; just skip), it shows a pop-up on the new tab page immediately after asking for the same thing.

Brave's business reminds me of Adblock+. They started all "we are cool, we make the web a better place" (which they did by the way), then they didn't know how to monetize, so they introduced "non invasive ads". Which is still ads, except this time, it's up to them to choose how ads should look like.

It's the first time I read more about Brave, and despite the fact I like that they try with a new model, I think I'll keep using Firefox and the usual add-ons, as I have been doing for years.

Re: Brave launches 1.0

#370

Post by readams »

harikb wrote: post #312
asdkhadsj wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I'd be happier if there was some notion of an inherent value in my eyeballs - and then I could just put that money into the system. Eg, I pay $5/m or $15/m, whatever, and that gets split up by the number of pages I view and content I consume. I'm a firm believer that FOSS and (Internet) Content needs funding. Yet, I loathe ads. They promote (but are not solely to blame for) behavior that is a brain drain on soci…

The reality is that your eyeballs are something like $200/month. You are just not likely to pay that money. When you factor in money thrown away at bot/fraud, advertisers spend a shit load of money just to reach you (and indirectly pays for a whole lot of entertainment tv-shows/web-content)

Here's average revenue per user (per year) for many top companies. https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

For anyone who is a user of multiple brands, you need to add these numbers.

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