[jonathansampson]

I recently did a 5 minute video on the history of digital advertising, with an introduction to Brave's model: https://youtu.be/LsrrT502luI.

Per https://brave.com/rewards and https://creators.brave.com, users opt-in to Brave Rewards and begin participating with privacy-preserving Ads. Each ad nets you, the user, 70% of the associated revenue.

Rewards come in the form of BAT, which moves more easily and comes with considerably less friction. The blockchain enables users to effortlessly and anonymously participate. This also means that everybody with attention (and not necessarily disposable income) can support the content they love online.

As for paying out in BAT, creators can choose to have BAT auto-converted into Bitcoin, US Dollars, etc. Users can also have their rewards converted into another type of asset or currency via Uphold too. BAT is simply a utility token, whose utility is currently best demonstrated within the Brave ecosystem.

To your last point, the "money going in" comes from advertisers. They pay in fiat currencies, or via BAT. If they pay us in dollars, we purchase BAT as needed from the market. Users can also self-fund their wallet, if they have disposable income.

[mattalex]

I understand that money goes in through the advertisers: But how is that money sufficient to maintain the current websites?

You watch fewer ads than before, which means (if the ads pay the same) that each website gets on average (i.e. if the split is the same as before) less money. As you describe it, only 70% of the ad-revenue actually reaches the user, meaning even if you watch the same amount of ads, websites get 30% less money, and that ignores that many people just opt-out of ads. (BTW do you know where that 30% go to?)

> The blockchain enables users to effortlessly and anonymously participate.

That actually makes sense. But if you want to get money out of BAT, don't you have to pay a transaction fee? And if you don't, then how does Uphold make any money to pay their developers?

For me it seems that there's money vanishing at every point and very little or nothing to replace it.

Also, wouldn't brave have a quasi-monopoly on ads in this configuration? Even if brave is an honorable company (and I have no reason to doubt that), it makes me uneasy to know that we are breeding another potential "too-big-to-fail" giant like Facebook/Amazon/Google.

Edit:

Rereading your comment again and noticing the "users can distributed bought BAT directly" part: Then the monetization system makes a little more sense. Do you have stats on how much people are paying in? Is the ultimate goal to get rid of ads entirely or at least shift over to a "pay for what you use" model? In that case I can understand that. (though the monopoly on website monetization part still makes me kind of uneasy)

[jonathansampson]

I think you're conflating the user with the publisher here; the user received 0% of the ad revenue in the past. With Brave, the user receives 70% of the ad revenue (the other 30% goes to Brave, which builds and maintains this apparatus).

You're correct that publishers lose revenue when ads are blocked on their sites, but not blocking ads means users are at an increased risk of being abused by malicious third-party actors. This is one of the main issues with ad and content blockers: they keep users safer, but they take revenue from content creators.

Brave is working on a model that reduces fraud, increases rewards for content creators, and rewards users for their attention. This won't be built overnight, let alone over a few short years. That said, we are making tremendous progress, now settling over 8-figures each month for verified content creators.

As Brave matures and develops, more options will become available for users and content creators to earn more.

As for transaction fees when converting BAT, you are correct. There are often transaction fees involved. But those often depend on how much you're moving around, if you're buying or selling, etc. Uphold and Gemini (our other partner in this space) may also differ between each other.

You're right about heavily centralization around Brave too. This is why we're working on THEMIS (https://brave.com/themis/), a protocol for decentralizing the Brave Ads ecosystem. We recently wrapped-up an effort in that space and blogged about progress: https://brave.com/themis-rfcc-wrap-up/.

We don't have stats to share on how many Brave users are self-funding their wallets vs earning with Rewards. That said, the latter category is naturally going to be much, much larger. It is also not an either-or thing either; many people opt-in to Brave Ads and also buy BAT to supplement their attention-based earnings.

I don't think the goal is to get rid of ads entirely, but rather to yield power to the user. Not everybody has disposable income, and therefore many people would prefer to opt-in to privacy-respecting ads, earn rewards for their attention, and support the Web by those means. For those who wish to self-fund, that is possible. They don't need to opt-in to Brave Ads either.

[mdale]

Even if a site made significant effort to have "non-malicious ads" I don't think brave would not block them with and put in their own.

I.e Brave is bootstrapping on manipulation of the intent of the publisher.

A cleaner aproch may be to approach publishers offer them a "better way" and decuple it from the browser marketing privacy / reduced ad load.

Likewise standards bodies, NGOs and Gov agencies need to protect users in the web and app ecosystems making it a more level in respecting user privacy / reduced harm. To control publisher / advertising / user relationship in a fair way.

But we live in a time of fast pace asymmetrical software mediated warfair and a few eggs are going to be cracked along the way in to trying to build something better.

[jonathansampson]

Brave does not touch first-party ads; you can do all of the first-party advertising you like. Unfortunately, whether the third-party ads are malicious or not is not up to the publisher. The publisher is simply asked to add a bit of JavaScript to their page, and that's it.

Brave doesn't inject ads onto webpages; so there is no scenario where you (as a publisher) would have our ads displayed on your page (unless you, yourself displayed them).

Please see this 5-minute overview of the problems facing digital ads, and Brave's proposed model: https://youtu.be/LsrrT502luI

[freediver]

Nice video, but it almost completely misses the point:

Even if all ads on all websites were made in a privacy-respecting way, people would still use adblockers.

This is because people simply hate ads in their browser. It is because they make browsing experience miserable. They add bloat. They distract from the content. They add cognitive overhead. They slow down browsing. They are literally unwanted guests in our browsers.

So Brave’s model replaces one set of ads with another, basically achieving nothing to mitigate the problem itself - very existance of ads in the first place. What makes Brave’s ad model worse is that it offers people a monetary incentive for doing an activity (watch ads) that we know they are trying to avoid (by using a browser with an ad-blocker). So the very premise of this setup seems to be that people hate ads just because they are not privacy-respecting. But reality is that people normally simply do not want to be exposed to ads.

(btw the only ad based business model that would align all incentives is one in which users would be paying to see the ads)

[jonathansampson]

Different people want different things; many people install ad-blockers because they don't like ads, period. Others install them because they aren't comfortable with the security and privacy risk. Quite a few people are conflicted when it comes to blocking ads, knowing that it cuts off the funding for content creators. Brave is for everybody; no ads by default, and privacy-respecting ads for those who would like to support content creators on the Web.

[rainonmoon]

This step in the chain of progress may require people to adapt to the idea of making less money in exchange for a healthier web.

[aabbcc1241]

if user buy BAT directly than distribute to the content creator, the story sounds similar to likecoin