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by lukemulks 2489 days ago
(Brave employee here) We block 3rd party ads and tracking, that collect user data, often without their knowledge or consent. Brave Ads are disabled by default, to ensure that no one sees ads that is not interested in viewing ads. This provides a benefit to advertisers as well, as they currently dump a lot of money into a dumpster fire, and are basically tasked with measuring how many of the pixels appeared on the screen for a certain amount of time. Brands don't know if people that viewed the ad were interested in advertising. People get shotgunned with ads. We're approaching this differently.

We've introduced advertising that is private by default, with a new approach to measuring and accounting for ad event confirmations through our ad confirmation protocol.

We have some information regarding the confirmation protocol here, for those interested. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Security-and-pri...

Aside from providing advertising that's private by default, our ad platform includes people in the process, by rewarding them for their attention (70% of the rev share for the ads viewed). People can then contribute those tokens to publishers and creators (like Wikipedia), or hold the tokens. In the future, people will be able to redeem tokens for gift cards, premium content, etc.

We'll be introducing additional ad units in the future for publishers, with a cleaner deal and better rev share than they currently receive (publishers will receive 70% of the revenue, people will receive 15%, Brave will receive 15%).

If we were just replacing publisher ads with other ads from the existing ad ecosystem, I'd understand and agree with the sentiment. That said, we're bringing new methods for ad delivery, accounting and matching to the market, all designed to function without leaking your information from your device. Hope this helps.

1 comments

You don’t block third party ads; you block first party ads that the website depends on for revenue
We don't block 1st party ads. We block tracking tags including GPT/GTM, which will block some direct sold ads. We can with the publisher as partner fix this, but not by whitelisting tracking.
has it ever come up to run something similar to Opera's old community driven javascript site patch library/database?

I think it would be amazing to have a browser, that instead of just blocking ads, had a way for you to set "whatever the community thinks is best" and have the browser pull down the best stylish/tampermonkeyish patches for a site, or completely new css. (you would also have a drop down with "see other popular views, and "set this view as default for this site, along with the ability to rank/vote on which template applies best for that site.) Or the user could have an option on first run that asks "ideally what would sites look like" and then have it pull the most appropriate modification to match that template. A user could lean towards "let the site express its identity and clean it up a little bit" OR "strip it down to just the essentials" OR "just fix the bugs."

In an ideal world, I would prefer to use a browser that, by default, homogenizes as much of the layout of a site as possible, with a one click option to "see it how it was intended." I think reader modes go a little too far, because they destroy content layout and nav in the process of cleanup. It would be nice for some elements, like navigation to come through, but in a standardized way, so the menu bar at new york times and washington post render identically, but still let me bounce between their different verticals. RSS readers sort of accomplish that, but I would rather be able to also BROWSE the web. RSS readers clean up one layer deep, but in a hyperlinked world dont let you get very far.

Greaselion is coming up as I write this. Stay tuned.
I just visited https://techmeme.com/river in Brave and on the right you will their first party sponsored posts, alive and well.