[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.

[freediver]

The argument is akin to saying you are working for a company that sells cigarette quitting kits but also sells cigarettes because "different people want different things".

And the content creator argument has long been debunked as smoke screen planted by companies in the ad business (and Brave qualifies as one), because monetizing any content through ads is the least efficient way to monetize creative work. What this model actually does though is incentivizes the creation of large quantities of low quality content.