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The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web

164 points by wakahiu 7y ago

hellllllllooo 7y ago
They've literally selected for a userbase of people who dislike advertising enough to go out of their way to find and use a largely unknown browser. I doubt that the people who downloaded it to avoid advertising will sign up for this without paying them a lot.
- justsee 7y ago
  Most people are sold on Brave due to privacy / speed / battery life. Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term. I only use and recommend Brave now, but have no intention of turning on ads.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term. People have tried microtransactions in lieu of ads, many, many times over the past decade. Hardly any users are interested, and those that aren't don't want to pay enough to keep the lights on at the websites they are visiting. This is an idea that's incredibly popular in techie circles, and falls flat on its face with the rest of the world (Along with 'floss twice a day', 'just run your own mailserver', 'manually updating my OS/browser/dogsitting app is better, because I can control what runs on my computer', and 'compile all the software you run from source'.)
    - justsee 7y ago
      Integrating a digital wallet into a browser elevates money to a first-class citizen on the web. That changes everything about microtransactions. I now have one location to top up and manage my wallet and can effortlessly pay for content across the web in a consistent, familiar way. The historical approach of endlessly getting out a plastic card and typing private information into a multitude of different forms will seem terribly old-fashioned.
      - vkou 7y ago
        People have tried this too, and it has failed.
        justsee 7y ago
        Which other browser has done this?
        TylerE 7y ago
        Remember Flooz?
        nilkn 7y ago
        Was Flooz a browser or just a digital currency? 1999 was a very different time as well for the internet. In particular, ads and trackers were not even remotely as pervasive and invasive.
        TylerE 7y ago
        It was an IE Toolbar, like everything back then
        vkou 7y ago
        The form factor in which this is delivered in doesn't matter.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    > Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows ...for them to siphon money from dumb investors cuz bl0ckcha1n!%$@$. Downvote me all you want, it won't make it not true.
TwoNineA 7y ago
Can't wait until someone automates it.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  That happened with AllAdvantage. People wrote programs like MyAdvantage to simulate web browsing to accrue credit.
- justsee 7y ago
  I'd say good luck with that. To acquire BAT at scale fraudulently from rewards will likely cost more than it's worth, and to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis. I don't think they've published anything on fraud analysis, but what their research team has published is indicative of the calibre of Brave's team: https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/
  - xur17 7y ago
    > to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis. Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? Otherwise I'm not sure what keeps people from withdrawing and trading on whatever sketchy exchange they want.
    - tinodotim 7y ago
      > Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? yes, afaik.
  - anonymous5133 7y ago
    As with everything, automating this at scale is very difficult because you'll need residential IP addresses. So unless you have access to a massive bot net, good luck.
- atomical 7y ago
  Quite a few people on here advocating fraud and talking about their friends committing fraud in their youth. Don't the software developers here make enough money?
winningcontinue 7y ago
former user of their product. originally presented to me as a chrome alternative with the ad-block built right into the browser itself and not as a javascript extension. But as the product has evolved, they've changed in ways to monetize it themselves. While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them. As a bonus, they're throwing you back a bone to put up with their new business model. Brave has inserted itself as a new middleman between the advertisers and web users.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Someone else accused this of being a pyramid scheme. But this sounds more like a protection racket. Beautiful ads, govnah. Would be a shame if somfin' 'appened to 'em.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    That's what AdBlock Plus did...
    - zenexer 7y ago
      And still does.
  - marrone12 7y ago
    The entirety of the online ad business is a pyramid scheme. You would be surprised how much of the industry relies on arbitrage.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- justsee 7y ago
  > While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them Not sure what your motivation is here in asserting something which is completely false. Ads are blocked by default, and their research team is pioneering new approaches to ad blocking. See for instance https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155 https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155 The browser is also open-source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
fenwick67 7y ago
"Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible." So people can pay to buy tokens but can't sell them, seems legit.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Unfortunately, MLMs are legal, and since a service is being done for pay (ads count as a 'service') then this is probably legit. But I thought the point of Brave was to pay content authors. Wouldn't a simpler and more consistent solution be to make it so that if a viewer received a payment for viewing ads (man that is hard to type) that the money is held in escrow until they pay it out to a site the user has visited?]
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    That's the basic setup of the Brave browser. You get shown a few Brave ads every so often and you can automatically "tip" sites by setting your preferences. It's kind of like Spotify where whatever you "earn" during a month gets distributed based on the amount of time you spend on a site. You can also not tip anyone but the Brave tokens expire after a while for the end-user if not used. This is just my understanding from using the Brave browser. I should note that I'm working for a startup in this space that is pursuing a different model but I support any and all efforts to put the Internet economy back in the hands of creators and average people.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    But then they can't use the payment for viewing ads and unclaimed tips for marketing their own product...
- streptomycin 7y ago
  You can buy and sell them on exchanges like Coinbase. It'd probably be a bad idea for Brave to get into the cryptocurrency exchange business - it's a tricky business, and it's not their core competency.
m52go 7y ago
This seems like one of those ideas that's great in theory but not in practice. I don't care about paying or even being paid when browsing the web...I just want to be left alone. Also this particular implementation is rather shady. See podcast: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/francis-pouliot-on-the-network-effect-of-money-and-why-tokens-are-scams https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/francis-pouliot-on-th...
- DennisP 7y ago
  I frequently find myself confronted by paywalls and demands that I turn off my ad blocker. I can usually find a way around it, but things would be so much simpler if I could just click a button to pay the site a fraction of a penny.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    That’s a neat idea. Could be a YC startup idea. A subscription service that gives you access to all the paywall content let’s say 10/month for 50 articles and you don’t even click a button just read. Rather than seperate paywalls, ads etc.
    - Wehrdo 7y ago
      Are you describing Blendle[0]? Access to paywalled content on a pay-per-article basis. [0] https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/
      - quickthrower2 7y ago
        I didn't know about them, but looks like they are doing exactly this.
        m52go 7y ago
        I remember getting on their beta list 3 years ago. Seems like they're still in beta...that cannot be a good sign. From what I remember, they're a closed platform. One must use their apps to get access to full article content. That's a nice solution for their partners, but not for the broader web (85%+ of the websites you stumble across that are not TIME, NYT, Economist, etc). Blendle is a nice experiment, but I wouldn't consider it a solution to the problem being discussed here.
numbers 7y ago
Currently, there is no way to actually make money by using Brave, it's essentially Chrome with some adblocker pre-installed.
- user17843 7y ago
  in the nightly version of the browser you can.
- techntoke 7y ago
  I'd rather use Chromium with uBlock than install Brave.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    I'd rather use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed. Remember, uBlock still displays ads, uBlock Origin does not display ads.
    - techntoke 7y ago
      Thanks for pointing that out. I actually use uBlock Origin as well myself. I prefer Chromium because it supports hardware acceleration on Linux, which Firefox doesn't consider to be important enough (even though they pride themselves on open source).
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
So, let me get this straight. If I set up an old computer in the corner and script it to just meander around the web 24/7 using Brave, I can rack up a ton of useless BAT tokens/currency/whatever?
- hellllllllooo 7y ago
  Like crypto mining through a third party? Does Brave even care as long as the person paying them thinks it's real?
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    Probably not but only until "they keep thinking it is real"
- justsee 7y ago
  Unlikely. The economics, fraud analysis, requirement to go through KYC / AML hoops to extract and convert to fiat would mean it's not a viable mechanism to enrich yourself.
- XMPPwocky 7y ago
  Even better, wait 'til you hear what you can do with regular internet advertising!
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  Yes, you can do that. It seems like the vast majority of other people on here have absolutely no clue what they're talking about because they've never used the browser. I have used it about 2 weeks now. Every 15 minutes or so a popup ad shows up which you click to get some brave tokens. It isn't much though. I figure if you botted it 24/7 you would get around 50 cents to 1.50 per day. Probably better stuff to do to make money these days IMO.
sergiotapia 7y ago
I stopped using Brave because of this exchange: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118689481777766400 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118689481777766400 >Our value add is free speech. A free speech browser. With a free speech app store. With free speech money. (Bitcoin.) We don’t care about saving advertising. We care about saving free expression. Fundamental difference. Fundamental USP. Edit: Not talking about anyone's politics here, I'm talking about Brave's focus on advertising - not end user's freedom.
- vlunkr 7y ago
  Looking at that exchange, The person who said that is making a fork of Brave, so...
- techntoke 7y ago
  Funny statement about free expression coming from the guy who donated to California Prop 8.
  - drak0n1c 7y ago
    Eich founded Mozilla and invented Javascript. He's done far more to promote free expression than to hamper it.
    - brewdad 7y ago
      With one massive blind spot when it comes to the free expression of one's sexuality.
    - techntoke 7y ago
      I don't really think JavaScript has done all that much, except made it easier to advertisers/hackers to do nefarious things on users computers with a very poor permission model. In fact, it is prob the #1 used language to limit expression in other countries and track/spy on users. Mozilla wasn't founded by Eich.
      - 7y ago
manigandham 7y ago
Brave is just an intermediary that replaces ads with other ads. It's an adnetwork delivered as a browser that creates ad inventory on top of the page instead of within it. That being said, the tokens are basically worthless. This is not what the digital advertising industry wants and Brave is not going to get any decent advertisers with this. They'll end up with the same shady affiliate/performance marketers running CPA ads currently infesting all the 'content recommendation' widgets.
- sbarre 7y ago
  This was tried during the first dot-com boom as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage
  - ChrisCinelli 7y ago
    I remember some friends using it with some tools to move the mouse around so they could get paid without staying in front of the computer. But it was very little money and it was probably costing more electricity than the money they were getting but for a teenager it was ok.
    - toast0 7y ago
      I managed to get one or two checks, I tweaked the programs I was running anyway (AIM, mIRC, etc) to have Internet Explorer in the window title, so I got credit when I was doing whatever I was going to do anyway. Sometimes I moved the ad window off screen with LiteStep though :D
      - Scoundreller 7y ago
        And that was probably the lower end of things. On the higher end, users would artificially generate hundreds of fake referrals and auto-surf for them, generating large amounts of referral revenues.
    - aestetix 7y ago
aasasd 7y ago
How about, ‘still no.’ Besides, I'd need a helluva incentive to use a browser with such a stupid name.
techntoke 7y ago
Remember that the CEO of Brave is the same guy who had to leave Mozilla for donating money to support California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California.
- bravoetch 7y ago
  Are you worried he's making your browser Catholic? I've met him, he's a great guy. Just because you might disagree with his political views doesn't mean you should choose your browser based on that difference.
  - biocomputation 7y ago
    Not sure how to respond to this. For many gay and lesbian men and women (including myself) Brendan Eich's donation to support Prop 8 was a very clear message. I'm perfectly happy to choose a browser that isn't developed by a man who thinks I shouldn't have the same right to marry as he does. I said a few years ago that Brave wasn't going anywhere, and it isn't. It's not because Brendan Eich donated to Prop 8 either. The vast majority of the large, liquid market of browser users simply don't care about privacy.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    No, I'm worried about the guy whose language has been horribly implemented into ever major browser and allows sites to do just about anything on my computer and gives away all kind of telemetry data without my permission. Sacrificing users' privacy has become the norm due to JavaScript, and I believe it was created primarily for that purpose.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      > ... allows sites to do just about anything on my computer You don't seem to understand how Javascript actually works. It can do just about nothing on your computer. It can't read any data off disk (that the site itself didn't create). It can't read data from other websites, unless the website operator enabled that (in which case it could read that data with just URLs, no scripting required). It can't write data anywhere except into specific storage files. Besides HTTP requests, it can't access any other process, service or resource without asking you for permissions. Telemetry is something that can be done without Javascript. I can just make any link you activate have some sort of unique ID. Maybe Javascript can make it a bit more detailed, but fundamentally nothing changes.
justsee 7y ago
I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants. Anyone who's been involved in the current ad-tech industry knows it's a total tire fire of fraud, technical incompetence and deep hostility to end-users. Brave's model is very interesting and also a threat to the current ad-tech cesspool, so there should be no surprise to see attempts to misinform people about the model. Brave doesn't replace ads with other ads. Brave is a browser first, with an economic layer that will support all sorts of opt-in economic activity in a privacy-respecting way. The tokens have a market price of more than zero. Advertisers already include brands like Vimeo and Vice, and many within the ad industry appreciate the model Brave is attempting. Using on-device machine learning to deliver relevant ads, while at the same time protecting privacy by not sending that data over the wire is a rather brilliant idea. It certainly remains to be seen what advertisers are convinced to trial this approach, but predictions based on a very wonky understanding of the Brave model aren't particularly interesting.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  >I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants. Why would I use Brave over a modified Firefox install?
  - justsee 7y ago
    It's faster, more secure, and uses less battery among other things. You can read a lot more detail within the research section of their site [1]. My previous browser setup was Firefox Dev Edition with uBlock origin, but Brave is just a better browser all-round now so I've completely switched. I particularly like where the sync-chain stuff is going [2]. [1] https://brave.com/research https://brave.com/research [2] https://github.com/brave/sync https://github.com/brave/sync
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      Be aware that they are testing uBlock which still displays ads, not uBlock Origin.
woodandsteel 7y ago
There's a lot of negativity here about brave. But the fact is that the web desperately needs a new financial model, and as far as I can tell brave is a lot further along on that than any other project. Would anyone like to argue that the present web financial model is fine? Or would anyone like to point to someone else who has an alternative that would be workable and is anywhere near usable? And let met add one more point. Any workable alternative is not going to be perfect, so the fact one is not is not, at least alone, a reason to not use it. But again, let me ask all the brave critiques, what is your alternative? And by that I mean that can be used by your average user, not something only a techy can make work.
- intopieces 7y ago
  >The web desperately needs a new financial model I don’t agree that the web needs any financial model at all. Content creators want a financial model and advertisers wants to continue to be in business, but neither of those desires indicates a “need” for a single financial model for the web.
  - woodandsteel 7y ago
    No, content creators don't want a financial model, they need one. If they don't get money from creating content they have to spend their time doing something else. And today they get that model from the centralized advertising model. Until someone comes up with a different financial model, that is where they will stay.
    - intopieces 7y ago
      Before the centralized advertising model, the web existed and had content. There are ways that people get paid without advertising, including donations and premium content subscriptions. The mother of a friend of mine lives in a low cost of living area and makes her entire living from writing gay BSDM anime fan fiction. She has more than 1k monthly subscribers, no ads. The web does not need attention merchants.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
turdnagel 7y ago
I find these kind of bait-and-switches to be really tasteless. Company X is created originally with the sole purpose of blocking ads and privacy trackers - and then decides to monetize using some kind of "good" ad. (I'm looking at you, AdBlock Plus.)
- jsloss 7y ago
  That's not what this is. I believe Brave has always had this model in mind. Or for quite some time at least.
- justsee 7y ago
  There's no bait and switch here. Ads are opt-in and for many of us aren't the most interesting aspect of baking a digital wallet right into the browser.
- Helloworldboy 7y ago
  Ads are opt in and this has been the stated plan basically since the beginning.
- rjf72 7y ago
  This has always been Brave's monetization strategy. And it's also completely opt-in. By default the software simply blocks ads, runs incredibly performant, and has a large number of built in privacy respecting features which can be toggled on a per site basis (scripts, tracking, etc). If the user wants to see native ads, they can. If they want to see 'cleaned ads, they can. If they want to see no ads, they can.
- turdnagel 7y ago
  It appears I'm dead wrong about this - sorry for posting before I got the whole story.
arcticbull 7y ago
My understanding is they’ve been taking money “on behalf of creators” who never signed up and pocketing it. That’s reason enough for me to not use the product. Sounds like it could be construed as fraud. Eich got pretty defensive on Twitter and this whole thing came up here before too [2]. [1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/24/brave-browser-is-collecting-donations-on-your-behalf-did-you-know/ https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/24/brave-browser-is-c... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736759
- justsee 7y ago
  Actually that's not true. An earlier version of the browser let early adopter users direct where Brave's own marketing budget of BAT tokens was sent to, including sites that hadn't yet signed up. If those sites didn't sign up, the tokens would eventually go back into the marketing budget pool of tokens, to be distributed to other sites (not to Brave). That's very different to the mischaraterisation you mention above, but no surprise as Brave's model is a threat to the current fraudulent ad tech ecosystem. They did make changes to the product immediately after that episode though. Now if you want to donate to a site that hasn't registered your browser will try for a period of time, and if the publisher doesn't sign up the tokens are returned to you to distribute elsewhere.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Sounds like it wasn’t much of a mischaracterization if there was a bunch of outrage and then they backtracked completely.
    - justsee 7y ago
      The mischaraterization, which you seem determined to double-down on, was an attempt to paint Brave as a fraudulent company trying to build a 'patreon for thieves'. Any honest onlooker doing the barest of research would understand the absurdity of the claim, but the amplification of that mischaracterisation was (and is) clearly aimed at herd programming to try to suppress Brave's growth.
MarcScott 7y ago
I don't think that this kind of thing is the solution, but when I click on a link on HN, in a browser with no blockers installed, and I see this - https://ibb.co/jhDfC5k https://ibb.co/jhDfC5k I can't help but believe the web is broken, and we need some sort of fix.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 7y ago
  I hate ads as much as any reasonable person, but I don't think this is an example of the web being broken. Wired is a magazine, it shouldn't be at all surprising that they would try to monetize their content. They have the right to be as obnoxious as they like about it. What's broken is the model of advertising on the web, the unregulated cesspool of greed, malware, tracking and dark patterns that led the public to inevitably reject ads wholesale as soon as it became widely known that it was possible to do so, and easy to implement. It's business and corporate interests that have to find a way to survive on the web, but the web itself will be fine with or without them.
xrd 7y ago
Brave got to where it is because Brendan Eich is the face of it. Everything I've seen about the browser seems tied to him, and generally his interactions with people seem testy and confrontational. It's ironic that Google owns the browser and ad network. Brave wants to change that by creating a new browser and ad network. But until they can make brave less tied to him it'll be hard.
- atomical 7y ago
  You could say the same about Apple and Steve Jobs. Please post legitimate criticisms for Brave/BAT. Your comment reads like a hit piece.
  - xrd 7y ago
    I stand by that I wrote 100%. He is a polarizing figure and that is impacting Brave. The early adopters they need care about this facet of the founder. If you don't recall his financial support of that controversial anti-gay ballot measure in California, you are either being ignorant or dishonest, I'm saying the people they need to adopt Brave care about this, not just me. Full disclosure: I'm working on an alternative to Brave in the crypto space. But I'm not shilling it here. But speaking about disclosure. What I find interesting about discussions of Brave are that many people chime in here without specifying their positions. I don't have BAT nor shorts on them. Do you have positions, do you own BAT or have a financial interest in their success?
    - emanreus 7y ago
      Polarizing figure can be a good thing, especially for early adopters and getting a foothold in the market.
MagicPropmaker 7y ago
According to the article, Eich will pay you in a "cryptocurrency" which cannot be exchanged for cash. > Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.
- xur17 7y ago
  > Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible. I'm confused by this statement - there are currently several exchanges you can use to trade BAT for USD. Is this suggesting that the UI will be made more clear in the future, or are users actually blocked from withdrawing BAT from their wallet?
  - sirn 7y ago
    Right now Brave require a creator account to be linked to Uphold which automatically exchange BAT to USD (at a 1.95% fee). Uphold balance can also be withdraw to a bank account in the US or to other cryptocurrency.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      I remember simpler times of the Web 1.0 age when Epinions would just mail me a check every few months. Outside of the reviews I wrote on their website, I didn't have to lift a finger to get paid.
      - xur17 7y ago
        But you did have to share your address.
ignoramous 7y ago
I think what Brave is doing might be misunderstood: it seems like a brilliant take on the current problem facing content creators... I think of Brave as trying to reach a common ground-- help content creators make a profit, put the consumers out of the current dragnet misery. That said, there might still be opportunities for different (not necessarily controversy-free) solutions, like the ones that are set in motion: - Net Neutrality violating deals by ISPs/BigTech. - Users forced to install apps (in a bid to escape the browsers). - Native advertising, where ads are indistinguishable from actual content. ...and so on. Is Brave's model any worse [0]? For better or for worse, things will continue to change. [0] IIRC, they have more than 10M installs. I reckon, if they hit 100M or so, they'd be fatal to the ad-networks. I don't see any other tech today wielding that kind of threat? Adblockers might have higher installation numbers, but they don't solve the problems for the content creators, so they are not really the solution to this mess we are in, imo.
LowLevelHacker 7y ago
I would like to be able to 'pay' visitors to my site BAT, can anyone say, is that possible?
Element_ 7y ago
I have been using the brave browser for a few months now. I think the concept is great, and possibly one of the best uses for crypto currency. In my case I want to disable ads entirely and use the auto-pay system to pay publishers directly when I read their content. It also has a "tip" button so you can send extra with one click if you really like the content. Edit: There seems to be a ton of negative comments in this thread from people who have never actually used the Brave Browser. I would encourage anyone who is interested to actually install it and try it. The ads section is completely opt-in. The "auto-contribute" and "tips" features can be used without the ads. I feel the "auto-contribute" and "tips" features are what would really appeal to most HN readers.
mmagin 7y ago
I'm still waiting for Brendan Eich to apologize for donating $1k to the campaign to to pass Prop 8 which held up same sex marriage in California for five years.
tlrobinson 7y ago
I'm a fan of Brave's mission, and the browser itself is great (basically Chromium but faster), but the practice of hiding publisher's ads but showing their own, which may or may not end up compensating the publisher, seems fairly unethical. I think a couple things would make it less objectionable and more awesome: 1. don't block verifiably "clean" ads by default, which basically means lightweight, no JavaScript, etc. Something like AMP for ads. If a publisher wants to show their own ads, given them a reasonable way to do so without buying into the whole centralized Brave/BAT system. 2. don't allow users to keep the money they "earn" from viewing the replacement ads. Ideally hold it in an escrow smart contract that automatically sends it to a charity if the publisher doesn't claim it after a certain amount of time. 3. come up with a way for publishers to easily allow users to pay per-article. I don't pay for a WSJ subscription but occasionally I want to read an article. Let me easily pay, say, $0.25 per article, otherwise I'll continue to find ways around your paywall.
superconformist 7y ago
NetZero is back, baby!
sonnyblarney 7y ago
"All Advantage" circa 2000. If anyone cares to recall.
mindfulhack 7y ago
This idea is very interesting. It reminds me of how YouTube shares their ad revenue with content creators, and that in turn grows YouTube's network and business. Similarly, the act of web browsing is content creation. It's data creation. Very valuable data. If users are currently blocking ads in their power, why not entice them back by allowing them to make an appropriate amount of money from the data that only they have the power to give to others? 'Sell your data.' The more one browsed or shared of their data, the more one would get paid. It's simple business. It sounds like a model that would bring diversity to the economy.
phoe-krk 7y ago
FTFY: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Watch the Ads If you do not want to watch any ads on the Internet, period, here's nothing the Brave browser can offer you than uBlock Origin cannot.
vincent-toups 7y ago
Looks bad to me. I'll be 100% frank: I never want to look at another advertisement again and I'm ok if the entire economy tanks because of it.
danielcarvalho 7y ago
Kinda reminds me of Ad Buddy from the series Maniac.
Jemm 7y ago
Sounds interesting but I just do not want to support a company with Brendan Eich at its head.
mud_dauber 7y ago
I started using Brave a few weeks ago. Not because of privacy concerns - mainly out of curiosity. One thing I did NOT expect is the noticeably faster performance. (Presumably due to the lack of ad content loading.) This is a big deal at my house. We turned off wired Internet service to save money during a job search. (There's only one HS vendor in our neighborhood. (And this is in Austin. Go figure.) We're tethering our phones and foregoing any high-bandwidth use cases. Has anybody published performance benchmarks?
rchaud 7y ago
Brave Browser on Android has been my goto since 2017. It's the Chrome browser, but with an adblocker, which obviously the main Chrome app doesn't support. That said, I really don't like this scheme. Paying users with a worthless e-coin while putting your own ads on top of blocked ads? Why would site owners opt in to this? So they can monitor 2 different ad systems present on their site? Not to mention, the conversion probability of a user who blocks ads is much lower than that of someone who sees ads daily. So how much would you really be earning by serving ads to people who specifically downloaded an adblocking browser?

164 points by wakahiu 7y ago

They've literally selected for a userbase of people who dislike advertising enough to go out of their way to find and use a largely unknown browser. I doubt that the people who downloaded it to avoid advertising will sign up for this without paying them a lot.

justsee 7y ago
Most people are sold on Brave due to privacy / speed / battery life. Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term. I only use and recommend Brave now, but have no intention of turning on ads.
- vkou 7y ago
  > Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows things like rewards for ad participation, but I think microtransactions to pay for gated content will be the more interesting aspect over the longer term. People have tried microtransactions in lieu of ads, many, many times over the past decade. Hardly any users are interested, and those that aren't don't want to pay enough to keep the lights on at the websites they are visiting. This is an idea that's incredibly popular in techie circles, and falls flat on its face with the rest of the world (Along with 'floss twice a day', 'just run your own mailserver', 'manually updating my OS/browser/dogsitting app is better, because I can control what runs on my computer', and 'compile all the software you run from source'.)
  - justsee 7y ago
    Integrating a digital wallet into a browser elevates money to a first-class citizen on the web. That changes everything about microtransactions. I now have one location to top up and manage my wallet and can effortlessly pay for content across the web in a consistent, familiar way. The historical approach of endlessly getting out a plastic card and typing private information into a multitude of different forms will seem terribly old-fashioned.
    - vkou 7y ago
      People have tried this too, and it has failed.
      - justsee 7y ago
        Which other browser has done this?
        TylerE 7y ago
        Remember Flooz?
        nilkn 7y ago
        Was Flooz a browser or just a digital currency? 1999 was a very different time as well for the internet. In particular, ads and trackers were not even remotely as pervasive and invasive.
        TylerE 7y ago
        It was an IE Toolbar, like everything back then
        vkou 7y ago
        The form factor in which this is delivered in doesn't matter.
- TylerE 7y ago
  > Baking a transactional layer into the browser allows ...for them to siphon money from dumb investors cuz bl0ckcha1n!%$@$. Downvote me all you want, it won't make it not true.

TwoNineA 7y ago

Can't wait until someone automates it.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
That happened with AllAdvantage. People wrote programs like MyAdvantage to simulate web browsing to accrue credit.
justsee 7y ago
I'd say good luck with that. To acquire BAT at scale fraudulently from rewards will likely cost more than it's worth, and to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis. I don't think they've published anything on fraud analysis, but what their research team has published is indicative of the calibre of Brave's team: https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/
- xur17 7y ago
  > to convert it into fiat will require going through KYC / AML processes AND avoiding being flagged by Brave's fraud analysis. Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? Otherwise I'm not sure what keeps people from withdrawing and trading on whatever sketchy exchange they want.
  - tinodotim 7y ago
    > Are they going to require KYC to withdraw from your wallet or something? yes, afaik.
- anonymous5133 7y ago
  As with everything, automating this at scale is very difficult because you'll need residential IP addresses. So unless you have access to a massive bot net, good luck.
atomical 7y ago
Quite a few people on here advocating fraud and talking about their friends committing fraud in their youth. Don't the software developers here make enough money?

winningcontinue 7y ago

former user of their product. originally presented to me as a chrome alternative with the ad-block built right into the browser itself and not as a javascript extension. But as the product has evolved, they've changed in ways to monetize it themselves. While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them. As a bonus, they're throwing you back a bone to put up with their new business model. Brave has inserted itself as a new middleman between the advertisers and web users.

hinkley 7y ago
Someone else accused this of being a pyramid scheme. But this sounds more like a protection racket. Beautiful ads, govnah. Would be a shame if somfin' 'appened to 'em.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  That's what AdBlock Plus did...
  - zenexer 7y ago
    And still does.
- marrone12 7y ago
  The entirety of the online ad business is a pyramid scheme. You would be surprised how much of the industry relies on arbitrage.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
justsee 7y ago
> While they still block ads, they're deciding which ads they want to block now based on how sponsors compensate them Not sure what your motivation is here in asserting something which is completely false. Ads are blocked by default, and their research team is pioneering new approaches to ad blocking. See for instance https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155 https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09155 The browser is also open-source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

fenwick67 7y ago

"Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible." So people can pay to buy tokens but can't sell them, seems legit.

hinkley 7y ago
Unfortunately, MLMs are legal, and since a service is being done for pay (ads count as a 'service') then this is probably legit. But I thought the point of Brave was to pay content authors. Wouldn't a simpler and more consistent solution be to make it so that if a viewer received a payment for viewing ads (man that is hard to type) that the money is held in escrow until they pay it out to a site the user has visited?]
- wavefunction 7y ago
  That's the basic setup of the Brave browser. You get shown a few Brave ads every so often and you can automatically "tip" sites by setting your preferences. It's kind of like Spotify where whatever you "earn" during a month gets distributed based on the amount of time you spend on a site. You can also not tip anyone but the Brave tokens expire after a while for the end-user if not used. This is just my understanding from using the Brave browser. I should note that I'm working for a startup in this space that is pursuing a different model but I support any and all efforts to put the Internet economy back in the hands of creators and average people.
- notahacker 7y ago
  But then they can't use the payment for viewing ads and unclaimed tips for marketing their own product...
streptomycin 7y ago
You can buy and sell them on exchanges like Coinbase. It'd probably be a bad idea for Brave to get into the cryptocurrency exchange business - it's a tricky business, and it's not their core competency.

m52go 7y ago

This seems like one of those ideas that's great in theory but not in practice. I don't care about paying or even being paid when browsing the web...I just want to be left alone. Also this particular implementation is rather shady. See podcast: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/francis-pouliot-on-the-network-effect-of-money-and-why-tokens-are-scams https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/francis-pouliot-on-th...

DennisP 7y ago
I frequently find myself confronted by paywalls and demands that I turn off my ad blocker. I can usually find a way around it, but things would be so much simpler if I could just click a button to pay the site a fraction of a penny.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  That’s a neat idea. Could be a YC startup idea. A subscription service that gives you access to all the paywall content let’s say 10/month for 50 articles and you don’t even click a button just read. Rather than seperate paywalls, ads etc.
  - Wehrdo 7y ago
    Are you describing Blendle[0]? Access to paywalled content on a pay-per-article basis. [0] https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      I didn't know about them, but looks like they are doing exactly this.
      - m52go 7y ago
        I remember getting on their beta list 3 years ago. Seems like they're still in beta...that cannot be a good sign. From what I remember, they're a closed platform. One must use their apps to get access to full article content. That's a nice solution for their partners, but not for the broader web (85%+ of the websites you stumble across that are not TIME, NYT, Economist, etc). Blendle is a nice experiment, but I wouldn't consider it a solution to the problem being discussed here.

numbers 7y ago

Currently, there is no way to actually make money by using Brave, it's essentially Chrome with some adblocker pre-installed.

user17843 7y ago
in the nightly version of the browser you can.
techntoke 7y ago
I'd rather use Chromium with uBlock than install Brave.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  I'd rather use Firefox with uBlock Origin installed. Remember, uBlock still displays ads, uBlock Origin does not display ads.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I actually use uBlock Origin as well myself. I prefer Chromium because it supports hardware acceleration on Linux, which Firefox doesn't consider to be important enough (even though they pride themselves on open source).

Lowkeyloki 7y ago

So, let me get this straight. If I set up an old computer in the corner and script it to just meander around the web 24/7 using Brave, I can rack up a ton of useless BAT tokens/currency/whatever?

hellllllllooo 7y ago
Like crypto mining through a third party? Does Brave even care as long as the person paying them thinks it's real?
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  Probably not but only until "they keep thinking it is real"
justsee 7y ago
Unlikely. The economics, fraud analysis, requirement to go through KYC / AML hoops to extract and convert to fiat would mean it's not a viable mechanism to enrich yourself.
XMPPwocky 7y ago
Even better, wait 'til you hear what you can do with regular internet advertising!
anonymous5133 7y ago
Yes, you can do that. It seems like the vast majority of other people on here have absolutely no clue what they're talking about because they've never used the browser. I have used it about 2 weeks now. Every 15 minutes or so a popup ad shows up which you click to get some brave tokens. It isn't much though. I figure if you botted it 24/7 you would get around 50 cents to 1.50 per day. Probably better stuff to do to make money these days IMO.

sergiotapia 7y ago

I stopped using Brave because of this exchange: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118689481777766400 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1118689481777766400 >Our value add is free speech. A free speech browser. With a free speech app store. With free speech money. (Bitcoin.) We don’t care about saving advertising. We care about saving free expression. Fundamental difference. Fundamental USP. Edit: Not talking about anyone's politics here, I'm talking about Brave's focus on advertising - not end user's freedom.

vlunkr 7y ago
Looking at that exchange, The person who said that is making a fork of Brave, so...
techntoke 7y ago
Funny statement about free expression coming from the guy who donated to California Prop 8.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Eich founded Mozilla and invented Javascript. He's done far more to promote free expression than to hamper it.
  - brewdad 7y ago
    With one massive blind spot when it comes to the free expression of one's sexuality.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    I don't really think JavaScript has done all that much, except made it easier to advertisers/hackers to do nefarious things on users computers with a very poor permission model. In fact, it is prob the #1 used language to limit expression in other countries and track/spy on users. Mozilla wasn't founded by Eich.
    - 7y ago

manigandham 7y ago

Brave is just an intermediary that replaces ads with other ads. It's an adnetwork delivered as a browser that creates ad inventory on top of the page instead of within it. That being said, the tokens are basically worthless. This is not what the digital advertising industry wants and Brave is not going to get any decent advertisers with this. They'll end up with the same shady affiliate/performance marketers running CPA ads currently infesting all the 'content recommendation' widgets.

sbarre 7y ago
This was tried during the first dot-com boom as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage
- ChrisCinelli 7y ago
  I remember some friends using it with some tools to move the mouse around so they could get paid without staying in front of the computer. But it was very little money and it was probably costing more electricity than the money they were getting but for a teenager it was ok.
  - toast0 7y ago
    I managed to get one or two checks, I tweaked the programs I was running anyway (AIM, mIRC, etc) to have Internet Explorer in the window title, so I got credit when I was doing whatever I was going to do anyway. Sometimes I moved the ad window off screen with LiteStep though :D
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      And that was probably the lower end of things. On the higher end, users would artificially generate hundreds of fake referrals and auto-surf for them, generating large amounts of referral revenues.
  - aestetix 7y ago

aasasd 7y ago

How about, ‘still no.’ Besides, I'd need a helluva incentive to use a browser with such a stupid name.

techntoke 7y ago

Remember that the CEO of Brave is the same guy who had to leave Mozilla for donating money to support California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California.

bravoetch 7y ago
Are you worried he's making your browser Catholic? I've met him, he's a great guy. Just because you might disagree with his political views doesn't mean you should choose your browser based on that difference.
- biocomputation 7y ago
  Not sure how to respond to this. For many gay and lesbian men and women (including myself) Brendan Eich's donation to support Prop 8 was a very clear message. I'm perfectly happy to choose a browser that isn't developed by a man who thinks I shouldn't have the same right to marry as he does. I said a few years ago that Brave wasn't going anywhere, and it isn't. It's not because Brendan Eich donated to Prop 8 either. The vast majority of the large, liquid market of browser users simply don't care about privacy.
- techntoke 7y ago
  No, I'm worried about the guy whose language has been horribly implemented into ever major browser and allows sites to do just about anything on my computer and gives away all kind of telemetry data without my permission. Sacrificing users' privacy has become the norm due to JavaScript, and I believe it was created primarily for that purpose.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > ... allows sites to do just about anything on my computer You don't seem to understand how Javascript actually works. It can do just about nothing on your computer. It can't read any data off disk (that the site itself didn't create). It can't read data from other websites, unless the website operator enabled that (in which case it could read that data with just URLs, no scripting required). It can't write data anywhere except into specific storage files. Besides HTTP requests, it can't access any other process, service or resource without asking you for permissions. Telemetry is something that can be done without Javascript. I can just make any link you activate have some sort of unique ID. Maybe Javascript can make it a bit more detailed, but fundamentally nothing changes.

justsee 7y ago

I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants. Anyone who's been involved in the current ad-tech industry knows it's a total tire fire of fraud, technical incompetence and deep hostility to end-users. Brave's model is very interesting and also a threat to the current ad-tech cesspool, so there should be no surprise to see attempts to misinform people about the model. Brave doesn't replace ads with other ads. Brave is a browser first, with an economic layer that will support all sorts of opt-in economic activity in a privacy-respecting way. The tokens have a market price of more than zero. Advertisers already include brands like Vimeo and Vice, and many within the ad industry appreciate the model Brave is attempting. Using on-device machine learning to deliver relevant ads, while at the same time protecting privacy by not sending that data over the wire is a rather brilliant idea. It certainly remains to be seen what advertisers are convinced to trial this approach, but predictions based on a very wonky understanding of the Brave model aren't particularly interesting.

hnaccy 7y ago
>I think the privacy crowd drawn to Brave couldn't care less what the (current) digital advertising industry wants. Why would I use Brave over a modified Firefox install?
- justsee 7y ago
  It's faster, more secure, and uses less battery among other things. You can read a lot more detail within the research section of their site [1]. My previous browser setup was Firefox Dev Edition with uBlock origin, but Brave is just a better browser all-round now so I've completely switched. I particularly like where the sync-chain stuff is going [2]. [1] https://brave.com/research https://brave.com/research [2] https://github.com/brave/sync https://github.com/brave/sync
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    Be aware that they are testing uBlock which still displays ads, not uBlock Origin.

woodandsteel 7y ago

There's a lot of negativity here about brave. But the fact is that the web desperately needs a new financial model, and as far as I can tell brave is a lot further along on that than any other project. Would anyone like to argue that the present web financial model is fine? Or would anyone like to point to someone else who has an alternative that would be workable and is anywhere near usable? And let met add one more point. Any workable alternative is not going to be perfect, so the fact one is not is not, at least alone, a reason to not use it. But again, let me ask all the brave critiques, what is your alternative? And by that I mean that can be used by your average user, not something only a techy can make work.

intopieces 7y ago
>The web desperately needs a new financial model I don’t agree that the web needs any financial model at all. Content creators want a financial model and advertisers wants to continue to be in business, but neither of those desires indicates a “need” for a single financial model for the web.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  No, content creators don't want a financial model, they need one. If they don't get money from creating content they have to spend their time doing something else. And today they get that model from the centralized advertising model. Until someone comes up with a different financial model, that is where they will stay.
  - intopieces 7y ago
    Before the centralized advertising model, the web existed and had content. There are ways that people get paid without advertising, including donations and premium content subscriptions. The mother of a friend of mine lives in a low cost of living area and makes her entire living from writing gay BSDM anime fan fiction. She has more than 1k monthly subscribers, no ads. The web does not need attention merchants.
deleted 7y ago
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turdnagel 7y ago

I find these kind of bait-and-switches to be really tasteless. Company X is created originally with the sole purpose of blocking ads and privacy trackers - and then decides to monetize using some kind of "good" ad. (I'm looking at you, AdBlock Plus.)

jsloss 7y ago
That's not what this is. I believe Brave has always had this model in mind. Or for quite some time at least.
justsee 7y ago
There's no bait and switch here. Ads are opt-in and for many of us aren't the most interesting aspect of baking a digital wallet right into the browser.
Helloworldboy 7y ago
Ads are opt in and this has been the stated plan basically since the beginning.
rjf72 7y ago
This has always been Brave's monetization strategy. And it's also completely opt-in. By default the software simply blocks ads, runs incredibly performant, and has a large number of built in privacy respecting features which can be toggled on a per site basis (scripts, tracking, etc). If the user wants to see native ads, they can. If they want to see 'cleaned ads, they can. If they want to see no ads, they can.
turdnagel 7y ago
It appears I'm dead wrong about this - sorry for posting before I got the whole story.

arcticbull 7y ago

My understanding is they’ve been taking money “on behalf of creators” who never signed up and pocketing it. That’s reason enough for me to not use the product. Sounds like it could be construed as fraud. Eich got pretty defensive on Twitter and this whole thing came up here before too [2]. [1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/24/brave-browser-is-collecting-donations-on-your-behalf-did-you-know/ https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/12/24/brave-browser-is-c... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736759

justsee 7y ago
Actually that's not true. An earlier version of the browser let early adopter users direct where Brave's own marketing budget of BAT tokens was sent to, including sites that hadn't yet signed up. If those sites didn't sign up, the tokens would eventually go back into the marketing budget pool of tokens, to be distributed to other sites (not to Brave). That's very different to the mischaraterisation you mention above, but no surprise as Brave's model is a threat to the current fraudulent ad tech ecosystem. They did make changes to the product immediately after that episode though. Now if you want to donate to a site that hasn't registered your browser will try for a period of time, and if the publisher doesn't sign up the tokens are returned to you to distribute elsewhere.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Sounds like it wasn’t much of a mischaracterization if there was a bunch of outrage and then they backtracked completely.
  - justsee 7y ago
    The mischaraterization, which you seem determined to double-down on, was an attempt to paint Brave as a fraudulent company trying to build a 'patreon for thieves'. Any honest onlooker doing the barest of research would understand the absurdity of the claim, but the amplification of that mischaracterisation was (and is) clearly aimed at herd programming to try to suppress Brave's growth.

MarcScott 7y ago

I don't think that this kind of thing is the solution, but when I click on a link on HN, in a browser with no blockers installed, and I see this - https://ibb.co/jhDfC5k https://ibb.co/jhDfC5k I can't help but believe the web is broken, and we need some sort of fix.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
krapp 7y ago
I hate ads as much as any reasonable person, but I don't think this is an example of the web being broken. Wired is a magazine, it shouldn't be at all surprising that they would try to monetize their content. They have the right to be as obnoxious as they like about it. What's broken is the model of advertising on the web, the unregulated cesspool of greed, malware, tracking and dark patterns that led the public to inevitably reject ads wholesale as soon as it became widely known that it was possible to do so, and easy to implement. It's business and corporate interests that have to find a way to survive on the web, but the web itself will be fine with or without them.

xrd 7y ago

Brave got to where it is because Brendan Eich is the face of it. Everything I've seen about the browser seems tied to him, and generally his interactions with people seem testy and confrontational. It's ironic that Google owns the browser and ad network. Brave wants to change that by creating a new browser and ad network. But until they can make brave less tied to him it'll be hard.

atomical 7y ago
You could say the same about Apple and Steve Jobs. Please post legitimate criticisms for Brave/BAT. Your comment reads like a hit piece.
- xrd 7y ago
  I stand by that I wrote 100%. He is a polarizing figure and that is impacting Brave. The early adopters they need care about this facet of the founder. If you don't recall his financial support of that controversial anti-gay ballot measure in California, you are either being ignorant or dishonest, I'm saying the people they need to adopt Brave care about this, not just me. Full disclosure: I'm working on an alternative to Brave in the crypto space. But I'm not shilling it here. But speaking about disclosure. What I find interesting about discussions of Brave are that many people chime in here without specifying their positions. I don't have BAT nor shorts on them. Do you have positions, do you own BAT or have a financial interest in their success?
  - emanreus 7y ago
    Polarizing figure can be a good thing, especially for early adopters and getting a foothold in the market.

MagicPropmaker 7y ago

According to the article, Eich will pay you in a "cryptocurrency" which cannot be exchanged for cash. > Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.

xur17 7y ago
> Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible. I'm confused by this statement - there are currently several exchanges you can use to trade BAT for USD. Is this suggesting that the UI will be made more clear in the future, or are users actually blocked from withdrawing BAT from their wallet?
- sirn 7y ago
  Right now Brave require a creator account to be linked to Uphold which automatically exchange BAT to USD (at a 1.95% fee). Uphold balance can also be withdraw to a bank account in the US or to other cryptocurrency.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    I remember simpler times of the Web 1.0 age when Epinions would just mail me a check every few months. Outside of the reviews I wrote on their website, I didn't have to lift a finger to get paid.
    - xur17 7y ago
      But you did have to share your address.

ignoramous 7y ago

I think what Brave is doing might be misunderstood: it seems like a brilliant take on the current problem facing content creators... I think of Brave as trying to reach a common ground-- help content creators make a profit, put the consumers out of the current dragnet misery. That said, there might still be opportunities for different (not necessarily controversy-free) solutions, like the ones that are set in motion: - Net Neutrality violating deals by ISPs/BigTech. - Users forced to install apps (in a bid to escape the browsers). - Native advertising, where ads are indistinguishable from actual content. ...and so on. Is Brave's model any worse [0]? For better or for worse, things will continue to change. [0] IIRC, they have more than 10M installs. I reckon, if they hit 100M or so, they'd be fatal to the ad-networks. I don't see any other tech today wielding that kind of threat? Adblockers might have higher installation numbers, but they don't solve the problems for the content creators, so they are not really the solution to this mess we are in, imo.

LowLevelHacker 7y ago

I would like to be able to 'pay' visitors to my site BAT, can anyone say, is that possible?

Element_ 7y ago

I have been using the brave browser for a few months now. I think the concept is great, and possibly one of the best uses for crypto currency. In my case I want to disable ads entirely and use the auto-pay system to pay publishers directly when I read their content. It also has a "tip" button so you can send extra with one click if you really like the content. Edit: There seems to be a ton of negative comments in this thread from people who have never actually used the Brave Browser. I would encourage anyone who is interested to actually install it and try it. The ads section is completely opt-in. The "auto-contribute" and "tips" features can be used without the ads. I feel the "auto-contribute" and "tips" features are what would really appeal to most HN readers.

mmagin 7y ago

I'm still waiting for Brendan Eich to apologize for donating $1k to the campaign to to pass Prop 8 which held up same sex marriage in California for five years.

tlrobinson 7y ago

I'm a fan of Brave's mission, and the browser itself is great (basically Chromium but faster), but the practice of hiding publisher's ads but showing their own, which may or may not end up compensating the publisher, seems fairly unethical. I think a couple things would make it less objectionable and more awesome: 1. don't block verifiably "clean" ads by default, which basically means lightweight, no JavaScript, etc. Something like AMP for ads. If a publisher wants to show their own ads, given them a reasonable way to do so without buying into the whole centralized Brave/BAT system. 2. don't allow users to keep the money they "earn" from viewing the replacement ads. Ideally hold it in an escrow smart contract that automatically sends it to a charity if the publisher doesn't claim it after a certain amount of time. 3. come up with a way for publishers to easily allow users to pay per-article. I don't pay for a WSJ subscription but occasionally I want to read an article. Let me easily pay, say, $0.25 per article, otherwise I'll continue to find ways around your paywall.

superconformist 7y ago

NetZero is back, baby!

sonnyblarney 7y ago

"All Advantage" circa 2000. If anyone cares to recall.

mindfulhack 7y ago

This idea is very interesting. It reminds me of how YouTube shares their ad revenue with content creators, and that in turn grows YouTube's network and business. Similarly, the act of web browsing is content creation. It's data creation. Very valuable data. If users are currently blocking ads in their power, why not entice them back by allowing them to make an appropriate amount of money from the data that only they have the power to give to others? 'Sell your data.' The more one browsed or shared of their data, the more one would get paid. It's simple business. It sounds like a model that would bring diversity to the economy.

phoe-krk 7y ago

FTFY: The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Watch the Ads If you do not want to watch any ads on the Internet, period, here's nothing the Brave browser can offer you than uBlock Origin cannot.

vincent-toups 7y ago

Looks bad to me. I'll be 100% frank: I never want to look at another advertisement again and I'm ok if the entire economy tanks because of it.

danielcarvalho 7y ago

Kinda reminds me of Ad Buddy from the series Maniac.

Jemm 7y ago

Sounds interesting but I just do not want to support a company with Brendan Eich at its head.

mud_dauber 7y ago

I started using Brave a few weeks ago. Not because of privacy concerns - mainly out of curiosity. One thing I did NOT expect is the noticeably faster performance. (Presumably due to the lack of ad content loading.) This is a big deal at my house. We turned off wired Internet service to save money during a job search. (There's only one HS vendor in our neighborhood. (And this is in Austin. Go figure.) We're tethering our phones and foregoing any high-bandwidth use cases. Has anybody published performance benchmarks?

rchaud 7y ago

Brave Browser on Android has been my goto since 2017. It's the Chrome browser, but with an adblocker, which obviously the main Chrome app doesn't support. That said, I really don't like this scheme. Paying users with a worthless e-coin while putting your own ads on top of blocked ads? Why would site owners opt in to this? So they can monitor 2 different ad systems present on their site? Not to mention, the conversion probability of a user who blocks ads is much lower than that of someone who sees ads daily. So how much would you really be earning by serving ads to people who specifically downloaded an adblocking browser?