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by winningcontinue 2620 days ago
former user of their product. originally presented to me as a chrome alternative with the ad-block built right into the browser itself and not as a javascript extension. But as the product has evolved, they've changed in ways to monetize it themselves. While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them. As a bonus, they're throwing you back a bone to put up with their new business model. Brave has inserted itself as a new middleman between the advertisers and web users.
4 comments

> While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them

Not sure what your motivation is here in asserting something which is completely false.

Ads are blocked by default, and their research team is pioneering new approaches to ad blocking. See for instance https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155

The browser is also open-source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

Someone else accused this of being a pyramid scheme.

But this sounds more like a protection racket.

Beautiful ads, govnah. Would be a shame if somfin' 'appened to 'em.

The entirety of the online ad business is a pyramid scheme. You would be surprised how much of the industry relies on arbitrage.
That's what AdBlock Plus did...
And still does.
Isn't Brave Ads opt-in? You can still use Brave as you have been.
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.

article says that they will eventually pass revenue to publishers. So currently they will take the ad revenue from publishers and keep it for themselves? Seems pretty shitty. There are sites I choose to support and this seems to remove that possibility even if they are serving clean ads.
Don't know if things changed recently. But back when I checked Brave out the idea was that they would only replace ads for publishers that opt-in to this, and the user would also need to opt in to be shown these. And then the revenue is split among publisher, brave and user.
This is all 100% up to the user. Brave simply blocks all ads by default. If the user chooses they can disable ad blocking, including on a per site basis. The user can also, if they choose to do so, display 'cleaned' ads. So you have three tiers of options:

- no ads

- native ads

- cleaned ads

It's totally up to the user to choose what they want.