For the uninitiated, Brave lets users opt-in to Brave rewards:
- You set your browser to reward content creators with Basic Attention Token (BAT). You set a budget (e.g. 10 BAT/month), and Brave distributes it the sites you use most, e.g. if you watch a particular YouTube channel 30% of your browsing time, it will send 30% of 10 BAT each month to that content creator.
- As a user, you can get paid in BAT. You tell Brave if you're willing to see ads, and how often. If so, you get paid in BAT, which you can then distribute to content creators. Brave ads are different: rather than intrusive in-page ads, Brave ads show up as a notification in your operating system outside of the page. This prevents slow downs of the page, keeping your browsing focused, while still allowing support of content creators. And of course, Brave ads are optional and opt-in.
> 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.
Right now, you don’t have to interact with ads to get paid, though that may change in the future.
It’s way less intrusive than pop-ups and full screen interstitials, which I hate.
Disclaimer: I’ve been a Brave user/tester for a while.
Edit: if you decide to opt-in, you decide how many ads per hour you see. That seems like a reasonable trade-off.
Though I suspect popup system ads would become old soon too.
Also, their ads must be by definition content-unaware
Is trading dollars for BAT on an exchange and then loading those BAT into your browser's wallet such a bad alternative?
https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
Unfortunately, it only worked on Google ads, which is something like 40-55% coverage, so you would still see some ads from other networks. Not sure what they're doing with it now, but it was nicer than dealing with funbucks.
Flattr tried it a while back where you could set aside 5 euro per month, or whatever, and they would distribute it to the stuff you liked the most. But the transaction fees were high for them and it was hard to do super small payouts.
This is a crypto case that makes sense. I’m not quite sure how they will keep an exchange rate with the dollar as the only thing you can buy with it is cash to content. So you can buy BAT from Brave.
And it's not new either. Tried many times in the past, and ends up not being enough for 'real' users to care, but people will try to exploit it.
It was envisioned exactly like that
You can buy BAT and send it to a site owner.
1. How does this impact my taxes? Wouldn't this be considered an income?
2. If i don't collect it where does it go?
3. If my content is being hosted on something like youtube or github do i get it or does the site hosting it get it?
4. How do i go about claiming that i own this, and how is this even verified?
After reading their FAQ, basically to collect any money you need to sign up for an uphold account. In order to become verified on Uphold i need to provide a random company a copy of my passport/drivers license/etc to verify my identity. On top of this they also take 1.95% conversion fee for working with BAT. Ontop of the 5% that Brave already takes by default.
On top of this if you are lets say a Twitch streamer sign up for Brave Rewards, but Twitch doesn't sign up as a publisher on Brave. According to the documentation you apparently get nothing? Where do those tokens go if someone donates?
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 enforced
Tax-wise, I'm not sure how that works (great question). Besides manually converting to your currency and depositing to your bank, Uphold has a debit card that will automatically do the conversion if you use it when shopping
They can attempt to send you BAT in the browser, but it shows that you're an unverified creator, so the browser essentially 'holds' the BAT and attempts to send to you for a period of time (I think 90 days).
You sign up at https://creators.brave.com/ for your website / reddit / github / twitter / soundcloud / etc and verification happens depending on the platform, then you're shown as a registered creator in the browser when someone visits.
You get the BAT donation and just like any income would have to consider tax implications.
I'm sorry, how is that not orders of magnitudes MORE intrusive?
The only major problem with this funding model that I can see is that it provides no incentive for users to contribute to the websites they visit at all. They can just as easily block ads and not replace that revenue with anything, which is actually the default behavior. It's essentially moving from a web funded by advertising to a web funded by donations; and based on past experience in using donations to fund open source projects I can't really see that model working out well for anyone but large, popular websites with minimal operational costs.
Though on the other hand, Brave does eliminate a lot of the friction associated with the typical donations model. Maybe they'll be more effective at soliciting donations on behalf of websites than previous efforts have been. It's hard to know for sure.
This is important. I’m already blocking ads. Brave at least let’s me give something back.
There is no world where I don’t run the strictest ad blocker available.
Do I have to solve captchas to qualify for brave rewards?
Can I make more money from being advertised to by being wealthy, and thus more valuable to advertise to or does brave capture all of that? Does no one capture that? Do I still get paid if I don't click through stuff? Do I get paid more if I do? How does brave verify that an ad has even been rendered? I doubt that it's terribly difficult to fool brave into believing that it has successfully rendered an ad at the maximum rate. Is it merely a violation of the ToS and if they "catch you" your bitcoins are forfeit? Is BAT a currency? When they confiscate your BAT, what is the legal process involved?
What if I want to launder a tremendous amount of money? Is brave going to suddenly make that a lot easier?
What if I have a massive botnet on the home computers of the elderly and I want to monetize it, does Brave help me do that?
In principle this may not be a very important distinction. However, I often think that I would stop blocking ads _IF_ the website I was looking at had actually vetted the ad I was seeing. I do not want to see so much garbage just for visiting a website. For example: I block all ads from theverge.com, not because their content is bad, but because I find the outbrain ads at the bottom of the page so asinine and tasteless that I'd rather not see any ads.
To continue on with theverge example, If they actually had selected the individual ads they were placing, I'd be totally fine with that. But I am not fine with them delegating that responsibility to another company that clearly is not up to handling the task.
But I see one big problem: For a significant amount of media, a browser isn't the most desirable content delivery mechanism. Take Youtube, for example. The web site is great on PC, but on mobile, the native apps are much better. There's no way those will add support for Brave Rewards, and the chances of the browser-based version catching up don't look so good either. Similarly, there's music streaming, podcasts, F2P games …
I don't want to be in a situation where I have to choose between accessing content in the way I prefer and jumping though hoops for the sake of shuffling those precious BATs around.
Equating the value I'd assign to a creator's work with the time I spend on perusing it seems quite iffy, too.
Meanwhile, Patreon already has most of these issues solved; in a super simple way.
I used to be interested in Brave because of their pro-privacy stance. The more I think about that BAT stuff, the less attractive I find the entire project. I can give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're idealists striving to build an ecosystem where everyone can help to create valuable on-line content, rather than entrepreneurs trying to syphon a portion of existing revenue streams into their accounts. But then I'm inclined to question their competence.
Even if it were closed-source, technically there's nothing stopping you from binary patching your browser to do the same thing. But then again, there's nothing stopping you from putting an ad-blocker in your normal browser; and faking clicks on your own website to "milk" advertisers is already a thing that has to be dealt with.
I don't think either Brave's model, or its being open-source fundamentally changes the issues facing ad-supported systems.
That part's simple: why wouldn't you want to create money from thin air?
LOL WTF, no!
But does YouTube get anything? To support their business
What if a user doesn't earn 10 BAT a month browsing?
It seems like that system would break down over time.
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 that. Maybe it goes into the same wallet but that's not important.
You can do none of them, one of them, the other, or both, but they aren't really two related features. They both just happen to use BAT as their money mechanism.
If you saw ads, you chose to see ads. And if you're worried about websites losing their monitization, you can disable the ad blocking too.
Meh.
I actually drop people on Patreon when they start adding ads or sponsors into their podcasts or videos. I would rather people be fully supported by their fans instead of double dipping into both fan support and adverts.
Because ad blockers are just add-ons, they can be circumvented. Also, many ad blockers allow advertisers to pay them to allow their ads to get through: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G3lu90...
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 problem.
If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit and not browser specific it would be more appealing.
But since BAT is an ERC token, how can they control who gives money to whom, and indeed do they even know that?
Wasn't that the concept behind Flattr (minus the non-profit)
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)?
It instead uses MacOS notifications to show ads which open new browser tabs when you click on them. So it does block ads entirely and then shows it's own ads through a separate channel.
That said, my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game, and I'm uncertain how valuable people who have to be paid to look at ads are to advertisers? I mean, Certainly some advertisers would still be interested. But enough to displace the current model? I'm just not sure.
Ditto. The long game seems to be to become an alternative Google of sorts. In the sense that Brave becomes the ad delivery middle man to every web user like Google and FB currently is.
With regards to the current business model, I don't think it's broken at all. What is broken is the expectation that because users find most internet content so worthless that they wouldn't ever consider paying for it that some alternative revenue modal surely exists to keep the current system afloat. It's a flawed assumption. These new ad modals are just lipstick on a pig. The underlining product is already not valued enough to charge for (like crappy news articles and hastily written blog posts). No new monetisation modal will fix it.
Business model for whom? For Brave? Or for the website owner?
If the website owner isn't involved in this choice, then this is racketeering. And racketeering is an old business model.
News organisations do not offer anything of consistent high quality that people are willing to pay for though. I have no faith that quality will improve if only we all switched off our adblockers and clicked some ads. People's propensity to read clickbait will not decline as a result of higher revenue from advertising. Most people aren't willing to pay for news because most news is worthless.
> what will news articles become? ads
This has already been the case for a while. I hope ad-blockers push them so far from legitimacy that they actually die off somewhat. When they had ad revenue bottom of the barrel "news" could survive regardless of the market not wanting to give them any money directly.
I'd probably use a browser that blocked all trackers and ad networks that do tracking/user profiling but did allow other kinds of ads. If enough people did that, the ad tech companies would have to evolve and target the producer and content rather than the consumer. That would be a big step forward IMO.
there will be fewer of them which is a good thing because the signal to noise ratio of journalism is about one to two magnitudes too high, they will be smaller and funded by communities who have authentic interest in keeping them alive rather than be incentivised to maximise engagement, and I'd wager they'd be more responsive to the needs of their readers and members.
1. The decision to base on Chromium is a bigger negative for me than any feature. We're all going to regret contributing to the One True Engine someday and it's going to be so painful to fix.
2. BAT is a pure money play. There's no inherent utility outside buying and spending. And Ethereum is nothing if not the biggest utility crypto out there. This is always one of those things in the Ethereum ecosystem where I point out that you didn't have to make yet another ERC-20 if your only play is money.
It's too late now, of course. But man, it would have been terrific to recommend a browser that blocked ads out of the box and wasn't part of the engine hegemony.
Google is the steward of Chromium and Manifest v3 is just the beginning. When a single corporation has Total Control over what goes in to their codebase, we're going to see more and more abuses making it increasingly difficult to maintain healthy forks. Given the tipping point of users, certain websites now simply refuse to work with any browser but Chrome.
It’s just a renderer that calls home with hardcoded references to Google’s services. You can’t avoid Google if you use Chromium’s source code without patching it [1].
Last time I watched one of their speed comparison videos a few months back, it had several examples where their browser was actually never the first to render the useful page content, but was usually the first to stop spinning the spinner in the top of the UI (which, naturally, is what they choose to measure and report).
I think Brave's payment model concept is a very interesting idea for freeing the open web from the need for advertising, but I haven't been impressed with the way the project has been executed so far.
To be more specific, my issues with Brave are:
- Still uses the Chrome Web Store as main store
- Does not have an easy way to load packaged extensions from 3rd party sources
- Even after adding them as unpacked, you still get the same annoying popup every time you open the browser.
- I received notices that "My account was waiting for a deposit" the entire time, even though I never allocated any money to anyone
- Tipping amounts are fixed
I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox", but their approach seem lazy, features halfassed at best and the sneaky anti-features that Chrome has been adding to push users to lock into Google stuff (see all my remarks about extensions) not addressed at all.
I'm using Firefox as main browser now, and I haven't been missing brave once.
Edit: Why do so many new accounts (green text) post to any thread about Brave?
As a long-time Chrome user, I have a set of useful extensions that have become a part of my daily browsing experience. I found converting to Brave an easy transition since everything I’m used to in Chrome is still available, right down to the developer tools.
As far as I can tell, Brave is basically Chrome with built-in Adblock and anti-tracking, plus an innovative mechanism for user-controlled advertising and content-author micropayments. I’m very impressed.
(not advocating for Brave, I'm a happy Firefox user. Just saying...)
Also don't know what you're talking about with items 3-4, I have 3rd party extensions loaded, it was pretty easy, and I don't get any error messages on startup.
Also I love the fact that all the Chrome extensions work in Brave.
It seems more like "Chrome, with some plugins" than anything else. It's a shame really, I like the concept of the BAT project, I'd be interested in using it as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm not interested enough to switch browsers and lose all the features and plugins I'm used to in Firefox.
You can start here: https://github.com/brave
A surprisingly big part of the Internet works as well or better and faster with javascript disabled, but sometimes it is actually needed and useful so I find this whitelisting method works well.
I tried playing around with the script blocking ability of native content blockers but never got it working properly, for one I think it can't block script tags only externa scripts.
But my recommendation, if you are giving Brave a try is to change the default to disallow scripts, and enable them as needed, it's refreshing to browse the Web without Popups 2.0 and all the other not so nice uses of JS.
(* only I've found with my limited searching)
It's pretty good, though I sometimes miss Safari with its amazing location bar autocompletion and ease of syncing with the iOS version. (Brave supports syncs, but it's not great, and the iOS app is nowhere as good as Safari on iOS.)
Brave does have some bugs. Since July or so, several sites (including my bank) don't work because Brave incorrectly [1] blocks their cookies, even with the "shield" turned off.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/6099 and several others.
I tried the rewards/BAT thing for a while but after a few computer changes and losing my wallet through the process, I gave up and just block everything and contribute nothing. I'd like to get back into it but all of those transitions just killed it for me.
All that said, there's a lot of good stuff in here and I'm happy to be using it as my primary browser. Now that they're hitting 1.0 I may actually be able to recommend it to non-tech people.
If you would own a video streaming service (a startup!) and some company started to pay your users for viewing ads on your platform in some MagicMoneyCoins putting your pocket outside the cash flow, what would you do?
If you would want to receive organic traffic from your ads and instead start to experience crazy stream of incentivized ad clickers with near zero conversion rate, what would you do?
Imo the answers to these questions are not that pleasant for Brave. Maybe I'm wrong of course, like the most of times.
Seems like it might be better to just force the user to disburse those funds to the sites they visit.
>Use Google Chrome store so Google still gets every info it ever wanted and even more than before because your fingerprinting is more unique than with Chrome i.e. you give away your entire browsing history for free to Google
Whoever uses Brave shouldn't be surprised why advertisers and trackers now have an even easier time following you
If this is the case, it seems that Brave fosters the use of ads, not reduce it.
Is my understanding right?
But users are increasingly more aware that protecting themselves from harmful ads also means stripping their favorite creators of support. This is where Brave steps in to offer a complete solution, rather than the partial solution of "just block and forget".
Brave Ads are opt-in, entirely private (data never leaves your device), and pay the user 70% of the ad revenue. By default, that 70% will flow out to the sites/properties you visit on a monthly basis. If you like, you can choose to keep some (or all) of it for yourself.
So we don't necessarily want a Web full of ads. We want a Web full of empowered users who have control over their data and attention.
#1 Brave advertise with privacy and speed while all they do is adding adblock.
#2 Brave replaces adds with their own adds. This basically means you get the same experience but cut off the income of the content creator entirely.
#3 Brave allows you to reward 3rd party sites. This system is so nice they even got legal issues as it was assumed as fraud.
#4 BAT. Brave advertise with consumer first. The best choice for the consumer would be Paypal. If there is an incent to stay with crypto currency Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Given Brave created their own crypto currency and base every model around that they can profit from Transactions/services with the currency too on top of the share they take when you use their add platform/feature.
Given the criticism its very hard for me to understand users sympathizing with the browser.
#2 Brave Ads are opt-in. You can alternatively fund the sites you visit on the web by putting BAT into your wallet directly and having the browser automatically distribute funds based on which content you spend time on per month. The entire idea of Brave is that people were already using ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how this is worse for content creators.
#3 ???
#4 BAT is an ERC-20 token - it exists on the Ethereum blockchain. Not sure why you think BTC would be better than that. Honestly not sure why you think Paypal would be better than that. At this point, anyone can transact the currency easily and quickly without any intervention from Brave. I can convert BAT to DAI right now on a decentralized exchange in less than a minute and have a virtual currency pegged to USD even if I don't bank with USD. At the moment this process is somewhat technical, but it overall seems very pro-consumer to me.
Regarding criticism 2, you have to opt-in. Otherwise brave is just a browser with adblocking capabilities built-in.
I don't understand criticism 3, but then again I have just been using Brave without opting-in to the BAT portion so I'm out of the loop on that.
Regarding 4, why would Paypal be the best choice? Paypal has shown they will close your account and confiscate your money pretty much at their whim. Using a non-BTC/Ether crypto token at least means your Brave wallet isn't a big fat target for crypto thieves.
I think the success of patreon et al have shown that people in fact are perfectly willing to pay content creators, they just hate ads.
I don't personally mind the Chrome Web Store default.
I've since switched to Firefox, which is much better on Android than when I last tried it.
I use firefox on desktop, but found firefox on android to be a bit clunky the last time I tried it (years ago)
On the good side, I like that I don't have to ever watch pesky ads on YouTube.
Overall however, brave-browser is great and offers a welcome change from traditional browsers.
About their Ad program - money are very small yet, for both: site owners & users.
The weird thing about Brave is that they raised $35 million from their crypto ICO, but that isn't like normal fundraising because you can only do it once. So they really need their real business to kick in and start working before they run out of that money, more than most venture-backed startups need to start making money.
Getting paid money to watch ads reminds me of AllAdvantage in the first dotcom boom. It seems cool at first when the system is juiced by investor money, but once advertisers realize the ROI is low, the money dries up.
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. :-)
Creators: https://vimeo.com/372813874
Speed: https://vimeo.com/372813765
Privacy: https://vimeo.com/372736442
This one isn’t an ad; it’s a video of a speed test of Brave vs. Chrome and Firefox loading sites that millions of users access every day and doing much faster:
Brave Browser Speed Comparison 2019: https://vimeo.com/371512354
Once they offer browser sync of saved passwords and history, I'm gone for good chrome/firefox on every other device I own.
The problem is that I think ads may be worth even more than that to creators, which if you have any doubt about their efficacy should make you rethink.
The other group agrees the web is broken, but then claims that Brave won't fix things and will even make them worse.
I don't think that is true, but the thing is, we need to have something new here, and Brave is the only solution out there at present that is developed, is trying to address all the problems, and is reasonably usable by non-techies, and so I am using it and I urge everyone else to do so too.
To those people who claim Brave is awful, I say they should be working on something they think would better. I suspect they aren't doing that because they are just negative people, or they are trollers who are being paid by the present internet powers-that-be.
On the latter idea, its not just paranoia. If someone came up with a good alternative, people like the advertising networks would feel mortally threatened, and I think it is absolutely certain they would strike back with a massive disinformation campaign.
I just signed up as a content creator and added my website as a channel - interestingly my website already had some bat associated with it. Does this mean that some people have already donated some BAT to it?
They are all absolutely PACKED with ads. Try it yourself. It's ridiculous. Every other paragraph is separated by ads, overlays, click-spam news, auto-playing videos, etc. I tried easily 7 or 8 different sites before giving up and installing Brave.
This is just anecdotal, but I think the categories that are targeted at the broadest category of users, probably scewing towards older and female, are just being straight up abusive. And mobile seems to be particularly bad.
This situation is untenable. I guess sites and advertisers are just relying on a continuing influx of newbies to line their pockets, but really it's a scorched Earth policy that can't possibly continue as is.
1) It tries to also be a bit-torrent client but the downoad doesn't even survive a tab closing. Pretty frustrating to lose a big long download that way. 2) new tabs have a weird eye-bleeding background and there's no way to change it
I do not work for brave, mozilla, google or apple. I also have no stake in any of those companies nor do I know anyone that works for those companies. I really wonder how so many people in this thread can have a negative response when I personally have felt the complete opposite.
I do suspect it has something to do with employer bias.
[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/1052#issuecomm... [1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/761 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
This reeks of being an astroturfing account.
I'd like to add that if your Browser is trying to add a new dynamic of economics but your UX is terrible dealing with tips (fixed) and you're annoying users about needing a deposit. You're doing it wrong.
It's almost like Brave doesn't even believe in it's mission. There should be an intense focus on their product. That they are relentless at it. Because right now, it all seems half-baked.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/413
I still can't use brave to watch netflix on Linux. Its a great product and I love shifting the incentive of advertising away from intrusive data harvesting, but treating Linux like its a second class citizen means I won't use your product. Whats worse is that Firefox is 100% open source and Chromium is 100% open source and they both manage to get this working out of the box. There is no reason for Brave to not have working Netflix
edit: Also I know the library that decodes the DRM is proprietary, my point is the integration with it is open and available, no reason it can't be duplicated.
Don't want to enable less secure legacy accessibility support.
https://community.brave.com/t/android-autofill-api-enabled-i...
Give Brave a piece of that moist and delicious $330B cake, because...
> That’s the inspiration behind Brave,” he added.
> there's never been a good ad in the history of advertising. 120 years and there's never been an ad that has stood the test of time and was fondly remembered like literature or a song. It is a profoundly anti lindy medium that exists in the now, forever
uninstalled, back to FireFox and DDG.
8.7M users!
Lighthouse doesn't seem to work properly, which I use Chrome for.
I prefer Firefox for trust in privacy.
Not to mention the massive privacy leak that is a public network of transactions, revealing browsing habits by way of advertising payments.
Brave: hey you want rewards? here's some notification ads
What's your agenda? Who's paying you to slander Brave?
In the early 2000s ads were simple images that loaded just as fast as everything else, and I didn't mind them much, even the cheesy animated ones. It's the delivery, not the content, that I abhor.
Beside, Brave is chromium based. If you want to fight the chrome monopoly, go somewhere else.
I could be fine with a fork of Firefox with a preinstall uBlockOrigin, Privacy Possum, facebook container, etc.
Then turn off the ad feed in Brave and enjoy the built in ad blocking. If you would still like to fund participating sites through Brave you can fund your BAT account with your own money.
I see the downvotes coming yet it is true check it for yourself. Brave is so easy to fingerprint compared to Chrome it defeats any purpose ever to use Brave in the first place if privacy is your main goal. Removing all the Google bits from the Chromium base doesn't help since you are so fingerprintable.
Panopticlick needs to update their docs to make that clearer.
Oh, my. I am so scared. And Brave is of course a knight in shining armor ready to protect our shaken foundations.
It actually does happen, and I've used ad blocking software consistently ever since.
