[grok2]

> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.

The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.

While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.

With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).

[noxer]

>all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.

Actually you pay for the ads. There are no companies who "can afford to pay for the ads". Everything they spend on ads is directly included in the price of the product. If you aren't a customer then another customer paid to show you ads. Ads are not for the user they are to maximize profit. It's a trade off for a company they can spend some of the revenue on ads to generate more revenue thus making less profit per item but more overall. They target the optimum which means that several percent of revenue is put in ads. For everyone else this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads or more resource wasting because ads make people buy stuff they don't need.

[jefftk]

> this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads

Ads can also be good for competition: if your upstart product is better or cheaper ads can help you get the word out. Here's a paper that looks at the effect of advertising bans on eyeglasses, and sees that they led to higher prices: https://www.jefftk.com/benham2013.pdf

(Disclosure: I work in ads)

[rswail]

"Half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - John Wanamaker

[spsful]

Agreed. Brave has extensively documented the process of their in-house ad network, and I have yet to see a better privacy-preserving alternative!