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It depends. Are Brave's ads more similar to the banner ads of the old days? If they are not so intrusive and privacy violating like modern ad-networks, that would still be a net win in my opinion.

As for the hypothetical youtuber, they are always free to put product ads directly in their videos if they can/want to. However, if they can only make money via abusive 3rd party trackers, that's on them.



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I’m not asking how you think the creators feel about ads. Did Brave as a company ever say that their product would be free of ads? If so, what was their plan for not going out of business?

Brave has blocked YouTube ads for years.

I genuinely think platform like brave is in the position to do good things with ads. A few things I have in mind:

First, I want my browser to be upfront about what they are doing. "We monetize through ads distribution." Honestly that won't throw me off. I don't dislike ads. In fact, I used to insist on not running ad-blockers when YouTube started to play ads. "that's how you support internet", I thought to myself at the time. My attitude changes when I realize YouTube is not a great representative for the internet.

Second, I want to see more diverse ads. Not new amazon prime titles, not the same mobile games, not Udemy, not square space, not the same thing over and over. I remember the first few years the ads on podcasts are quite interesting and diverse, and I can even find helpful business and products from the ads. Maybe it is because the entry fee is low so small businesses have a chance to market themselves. And maybe all you need is to write a appealing script instead of hiring professionals to make a Hollywood grade video with celebrities shouting brand names. Unfortunately that dynamics is certainly lost today.

I know I am asking too much as someone who's opinion does not matter at all. But place like Show HN and products hunts kind of give me hope that someday maybe paid ads can become something useful instead of hateful, someday maybe people with good products and honest marketing strategy can have the equal chances to get attention as big players.


Brave's business model is also about ads.

That's still terrible. If I'm a Youtube content creator who doesn't want anything to do with Brave, they're still going to remove the ads that I want on my videos to monetize my content, and hold any of the BAT that Brave users contribute to me hostage.

If so that makes sense as Brave is happy to show you "ethical ads” instead of the ads already on a page if you so choose and reward you and the original content creator(maybe) with their very own funny money.

Brave also blocks ads. I would think youtube have a better chance at suing them.

Do you hate click bait?

Do you wish the "free" content was of higher quality?

Do you think a insightful blog post, youtube video, or similar content is worth rewarding the person who made said content?

Seems like the main evil of advertising is that it doesn't directly reward the maker of the content. Most of it is sucked up by the middle men who siphon off most of the money and force the content providers to work ever harder for their ever smaller fraction of the proceeds.

Using brave seems much like using Patreon to sponsor your favorite content providers. But instead of trying to manually set a $ per month per provider you can just use your eyeball time to control each content providers share.

Seems like the internet where brave (or similar) was popular would be a much nicer place than the current advertising.

Wouldn't you be willing to pay $20 or similar a month if that meant zero ads for you and your favorite sites got more money than they get through advertising today?


To me, the bigger surprise is that these ads on YouTube promote that Brave blocks YouTube ads.

>1st party ads aren't blocked. So if that developer wanted to monetize with ads, they're totally free to do so.

They're only free to do so in Brave's eyes if they roll their own ad solution, which is an option but not _always_ the best option. The "easy" (and, arguably, more featureful/secure/"better") route to monetize across the Internet (especially on hobby projects and small businesses) is third-party ads. There's lots of reasons someone might weigh the options and make the decision to go with a third party ad provider; Brave takes that decision away. Whether that's better or worse for the Internet as a whole is debatable.


I'm almost certain Brave would have something like this too as advertising is their business model, right?

I think Brave's business model of blocking all these harmful ads that track you is awesome. Users can then opt-in to get paid to view notification-based privacy preserving ads. Websites and publishers can make up for the loss of revenue from these ads through creators.brave.com

Ads are here to stay unless human nature about paying for shit changes. Brave's approach while still having ads may nor may not be worse than FireFox who receive the majority of their revenue by partnering with search engines, who, y'know, mine your data and dont pay for it

Ad-blockers not. But Brave profits by replacing website ads with its own ads.

Yeah, if they denied brave from advertising on YouTube it would be a pretty big story.

Well maybe... it's certainly a different approach than being tracked, surveilled and served up personal ads.

Brave is using cryptocurrency as an alternative revenue model for content creators than advertisements, and in some ways it's much more of a "white mirror" kind of tech.


ad blocking is fundamentally fine. Brave's entire business model is around stealing from content creators.

I never used Brave myself. The problem I see with Brave is is their business model being counterproductive for the web. If I understood correct, they block ads placed by the the content creators, just to replace them with their own monetization model... doesn't seem fair to me.

Well brave does intend on displaying ads at some point. Without knowing their exact implementation as to what ads will be displayed it might be possible eventually.
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