I don't use brave myself, but I appreciate that it's actually taking serious efforts trying to fix the problem of ads. I'm kind of a little surprise hn seems to be so blind to this issue, considering the number of people here who are employed by companies that literally live off of ads. If ads are bad and annoying (which most here would agree they are) but I still want to support certain websites (because some websites produce good content that I value), there's no convenient way to do that right now outside of allowing ads on that website, which is not particularly desirable. Brave seems to be the only one seriously trying to address that.
Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).
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.
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
I love Brave. I'm still locked into Chrome out of habit but I'm slowly trying to push myself over to Brave. It does a much, much better job ad blocking natively, and it's getting better with every release. The primary reason, however, is I like the idea of controlling how ad revenue is used. I think the idea of paying people to accept ads is a long overdue.
There's a lot of ways to look at this and I could easily write a few essays on it. At least for myself though, I don't personally view it as a bad thing. Blocking ads is the only questionable part of the story, but in my view that's just a matter of not displaying the full contents of the page so I find it hard to incriminate. Anything after that (including displaying other ads) is unrelated.
At the end of the day I hope the brave model catches on - not only are the brave ads more ethical since the ads are served locally (ie no user tracking server side), but my understanding is you can also fill up your wallet with your own money and then use that for the micro-transactions given to each site you visit, which gives you the choice to still support the ecosystem but without ads being necessary. Unfortunately brave is not easy for me to use for other reasons but if it ever got big enough maybe they'd make a Firefox extension or something so I could at least plug into the payment system without all the other blocking/brave ads features.
Brave is wonderful. Whenever I encounter a site with bad advertising, or a paywall, Brave skips right around it. I really like the idea the browser puts forth that you can have some say over where advertising dollars go. It's a little clunky but hopefully that will get better with time.
Don't enable ads if you do not want them. Personally I think avoiding ads is important so I don't enable them. Thus Brave acts like what Firefox should be had its organization not become so broken.
Fair point. Brave's system is still better than just blocking all ads without offering an alternate funding mechanism for creators though; and people seem to have no problem with browser extensions that do that.
I'm a publisher relying on ad revenue, and I hate Brave. It's not because it blocks my ads (I also contribute to an ad blocker list myself), but because Brave can swap my ads with its own. This is theft!
Brave is similar to Opera. It's not a mainstream browser, and they also want to make money. Dipping into publisher revenue and using some broken BAT crypto currency to reward publishers is not the way to do it. The currency itself is mostly useless and unstable, plus you will be making peanuts compared to even the lowest CPM country in AdSense.
What we need is an ad provider that provides a meaningful experience to advertisers and non-invasive ads to publishers. An entirely context-based, tracking-less, controlled (iframed and sandboxed).
A browser is a user-agent and it should stay that way. I like certain things Brave is doing (such as proxying Google Safe Browsing API requests), but for all this BAT nonsense, I would still stick with Mozilla.
I'm with you, my jaw drops when I see so much support for brave on hn. Super shady. Do they still replace website ads with their own ad network? (I'm all for blocking ads, but does this really not seem wrong to anyone?
Did Brave ever claim to reduce the use of ads? As I understand, they want to shift the revenue model and put control back in hands of users. You can use their browser and ignore ads (also not receive Bats) or you can see ads and receive compensation for it.
Brave's business reminds me of Adblock+. They started all "we are cool, we make the web a better place" (which they did by the way), then they didn't know how to monetize, so they introduced "non invasive ads". Which is still ads, except this time, it's up to them to choose how ads should look like.
It's the first time I read more about Brave, and despite the fact I like that they try with a new model, I think I'll keep using Firefox and the usual add-ons, as I have been doing for years.
I think Brave is on the right track, but I am skeptical the kind of users that are aggressively anti-ad are going to like seeing ads straight in their notifications.
I'd prefer to just pay Brave e.g. $10/month and have it give out that money to sites I visit.
Hence why I like Brave. Their model is very solid and seems a lot more sustainable than depending on Google as their overlord. Ads are voluntary, displayed as a system notification and vetted by Brave. Watch ads, you get tokens which pay publishers. If you don't want ads, you can buy tokens. If you don't want to buy tokens, you still won't see ads. And except for the first offer there is no nag screen either.
I think Firefox is awesome and it is really bad if we continue the Chrome/blink hegemony, but I can't stand for their decision to not block all ads instead of just trackers, especially on phones. The modern web without a 'real' adblocker is borderline unusable and Firefox prioritizing publishers over users doesn't sit well with me.
For me Brave has incentive problems too. They are aiming to replace the adtech market, but I'd rather a browser was made by someone seeking to abolish rather than replace that broken incentive space.
Yeah Brave's business model always seemed incredibly scummy to me. For ad blocking arguments can be made both ways, but Brave's "let's replace them with our ads" model (I know it's opt-in) just seems like a way to hold site revenue hostage. Either join Brave's network or miss out.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
I've been using Brave on mobile and my laptop (currently running Pop!_os) exclusively for about six months now, coming from Firefox. Your criticism isn't accurate, Brave doesn't insert ads into pages, it gives you the option of receiving ads in your notification stream. If you choose to allow the ads you are compensated with a small amount of a crypto currency, which you can opt to have automatically distributed to the participating sites you visit. Wikipedia, for example, is a participating site. These micropayments offer the only viable monetization alternative I'm aware of to charging for access, selling user data, or including advertising on your page. I've moved to using Brave exclusively because I want to live in a world where the web is free to access but my privacy is respected and my browser isn't crowded with ads.
Brave is perhaps the only platform which is trying to compensate the ads viewer by giving them a part of that revenue pie (in terms of BAT crypto-currency). No other browser or even affiliate system is even trying to do this AFAIK.
I've been using Brave since the redesign of firefox mobile, initially on android and shorty after on my laptop too. I came for the built-in ad blocking but have come to really love their alternative to the paywall/advertisers/user-data monetization schemes. Advertisers can purchase unobtrusive text ads or new-tab background image ads. Users can choose to see either of those ad streams or not, and can choose how frequently they'd like to see them, in return they are compensated in BAT (basic attention tokens). BAT get their value because ads on the platform can only be purchased in the token, all of which are already minted and in circulation. Websites like Reuters can opt in to receiving micro transactions from each brave user in exchnage for the content viewed. Contributing for content is optional, and you can set the split how you like, or turn ads off entirely.
I turn them off when I'm coding, but have them on when I'm just reading hn or wikipedia. Over time, if adoption grows, the value of the audience will too, so there is speculative value in the token, which creates a feedback loop incentivizing more and more users to switch to Brave. I hope it can be a real business model for monetizing content soon.
Do you know of any other major effort being put into alternative (convenient) mechanisms for monetization? I'd be interested in looking into it if you do, since I don't use brave (Firefox has too many useful features to me).
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