Before using Brave, you should consider if you value their business model as ethical (I don't). What they do is filter-out ads and replace them with ads of their customers.
No, we do not. We talked about this model in 2016 but without specifying publishers as consenting partners -- which was implicit and is the only way we might do such third-party ad slot filling in Brave (work under way with partners, e.g., Dow Jones Media Group). The ad slot owner, in this case the publisher, gets 70%; the user gets 15%.
We would not replace ads on page without both user and publisher consent.
We are focused first on user-private ads that go in the user's inventory (notification channel and private tab), paying the user in tokens which then flow by default to the user's top sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch, etc. These ads involve no publisher at all so we pay the user 70%. In either case: 1/ ad "inventory" owner gets 70%, way above the programmatic norm of 40% or much lower due to fraud; 2/ user gets at least as much as we do. HTH.
The publishers didn't agree to it. Brave is not allowed to unilaterally dictate terms. If I'm going to steal from publishers, nobody should benefit, especially not some smarmy browser vendor. Similarly, if I'm going to pirate, I'm not going to pay some piracy middleman who makes up some cryptocurrency to send to the content creators.
Of Firefox, Chrome, and Brave; Brave is by far the worst browser of the bunch. It's not even pretending not to be evil, let alone trying and failing like the others.
But that's essentially was Google is doing: dictating things unilaterally.
And that's also how the web was founded. No one agreed to anything. People just started to build.
If there isn't a law against it, they are allowed to do it.
Everyone who uploads free content on the web without a paywall essentially says "take it and display it however you like".
Besides that, Brave is essentially building a sustainable model in favor of publishers. They will be very thankful.
It is ad-blocker without an alternative model that is problematic for publishers, not Brave. So I don't see why anyone besides Ad-Tech has a problem with Brave.
You conveniently ignore that most publishers desparately want to see a new model succeed, because Google and Facebook take too much of a share of the publishers. Brave takes less then Google et al., so publishers get more. That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Brave isn't free of problems, but arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate. So where does your hostility come from? Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
> But that's essentially was Google is doing: dictating things unilaterally
Nonsense. The publishers agreed to sell their inventory to Google, just as the movie studios agreed to license their content to Netflix or sell it on DVD.
Everything else from your post stems from this fundamental misunderstanding about how publishers monetize their content.
> That's why publishers like the Guardian are already on board.
Then it's ethical for Brave to monetize The Guardian's content. It is not ethical for it to monetize everybody else's. The same with a piracy service. If a piracy service resells content it has an agreement from the owner to resell, that's kosher. It doesn't mean that it also gets to resell everybody else's content.
> Do you work for some big ad-tech company?
No. I'm just not stupid enough to accept Eich's stupid output.
Brave does not monetize content. Everything that is monetized goes to the wallets of publishers, minus a fee.
Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free. Consequently there isn't a licence involved, in contrast to your movie example. The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
> Brave does not monetize content. Everything that is monetized goes to the wallets of publishers, minus a fee [emphasis added].
Your second sentence contradicts your first sentence.
> Publishers don't "sell their inventory", since everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free.
They have spots on their web pages for advertisements that they sell to Google or other ad networks. Brave unilaterally takes those spots from the publisher for a price the publisher never agreed to.
> The publishers chose Google as their middle-man to make money with ads.
That's the point. They sold that inventory to Google, not to Brave.
> everything a website puts up on the web is essentially free
No it's not, at least in the EU as of last month's copyright reform. Meaning aggregator and search sites need to pay royalties for syndicating significant portions to publishers. That it's technically possible to scrape content doesn't mean scraping doesn't run afoul of copyright legislation and press norms such as proper attribution. You could also technically "scrape" written books; yet re-publishing your own book copies isn't considered legal.
> arguing from a moral perspective isn't legitimate
Not the one you're responding to, but to say his/her reasoning isn't "legitimate" is a bit rich when the GP (me) was about ethics. I'm with you on Google/Fb getting all the ad spent, but I don't think another middleman and wannabe monopoly such as Patreon is going to solve it. I might be in the minority here, but I think its fair publishers get their clicks for their content-based, non-tracking ads; we need to drive tracking, targeting and other third-party crap out of the web under privacy regulations, though, because that's what breaks the feedback of ad spend to publishers/creators (apart from causing the general race-to-the-bottom trend).
We would not replace ads on page without both user and publisher consent.
We are focused first on user-private ads that go in the user's inventory (notification channel and private tab), paying the user in tokens which then flow by default to the user's top sites and creators on YouTube, Twitch, etc. These ads involve no publisher at all so we pay the user 70%. In either case: 1/ ad "inventory" owner gets 70%, way above the programmatic norm of 40% or much lower due to fraud; 2/ user gets at least as much as we do. HTH.