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If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to

If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of it even indirectly.

NelsonMinar 7y ago
Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.
- fastball 7y ago
  I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
    - DHPersonal 7y ago
      I think you have a point, but the Brave Rewards program can also be seen as a redistribution system. For the sites that one wishes to support, one can choose to disable the ad-blocking system in Brave and see the standard ads. For the sites that are distributing bad advertisements, the ad-blocking system is useful and might be wise to enable. The in-browser ads then give a small funding to the user who sends it back to the sites that were unblocked, further increasing their revenue.
    - Ajedi32 7y ago
      > Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. I think that's why they went with a cryptocurrency for payment. Brave isn't a middleman, or at least there's no technical reason why they have to be. Users pay publishers directly, using tokens that they earn from Brave in exchange for viewing ads.
    - KKPMW 7y ago
      But nobody is holding anything hostage. When you use Brave, you can opt-in to display ads on your Browser, and while doing so still get ads from Brave. So the choice to cut-off ads from the content publisher is yours. If you think it's unethical - just do not block the ads.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        Brave is holding the publisher's monetization hostage. Again, my issue is not with the user but with Brave.
        fastball 7y ago
        But... they're not though. Ad-blocking in Brave (as it already exists in every other browser via plugins) is optional. Brave ads (a paradigm which doesn't exist in any other browser) are optional. You can disable both, enable both, or disable one and not the other. The choice is absolutely on the user and Brave isn't holding anything hostage.
  - denismi 7y ago
    There's also: Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a position to claim revenues of the ads they're seeing? Depending on the answers to those questions, the addition of (2) could be worse for these publishers if it makes some users who otherwise would've (begrudgingly or otherwise) chosen option (0) feel morally justified in switching over to (2), converting their real (0)-derived revenues into unrealised (2)-derived theoretical revenues.
    - jancsika 7y ago
      > Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network Unfortunately, that is likely not an optimally ethical reference state for the browser. Navigating with no ad blocker leaves the user open to all kinds of nasty tracking, auto-loading, and general trickery. When taken together that shady behavior can be seen by a reasonable person to outweigh the benefits of maximizing revenue for the user's favorite sites. Case in point: if I want to open a pdf music score from IMSLP, IMSLP displays an ad with the prominent text "Download PDF" in it. If I follow the ad it eventually prompts me to install a Chrome extension. Do you think it's wise to install that extension? In general I trust that IMSLP is an ethical site-- after all, they've spent a lot of effort to ensure that nobody downloads a score that is still under copyright in the country where the user is located. Did they forget to check a box to disallow misleading ads for their site? If there's no such checkbox "preferred network" is quite a euphemism and the correct/ethical reference state for browsers is with ublock origin installed. Edit: just to be clear-- 2 could still be worse than 1 depending on how Brave browser behaves. But for most practical uses of the web by non-technical users, your 0 is almost always a worse ethical choice than 1.
    - nilkn 7y ago
      Option 0 is no longer an option because ads are no longer just ads. They are malicious trackers that collect as much data about you as possible and sell it all over the place. It's unethical for a site to even host such "ads" as a method of monetization.
- mrzimmerman 7y ago
  I've been using Brave for a few months and I've never seen it substitute it's own ads within any applications or websites. It instead uses MacOS notifications to show ads which open new browser tabs when you click on them. So it does block ads entirely and then shows it's own ads through a separate channel.
- buboard 7y ago
  The idea is to nudge advertisers and publishers towards a more transparent model without middlemen. Unethical is what's happening today, with middlemen making obscene profits. It's more like civil disobedience than unethical.
  - jamiequint 7y ago
    Middlemen are not ipso facto unethical. The publishers have voluntarily opted-in to ad exchanges because those exchanges provide value by aggregating demand in a way that would be difficult for all but the largest publishers to do themselves (and the largest publishers do, which is why FB/Google/Snap/Twitter/etc all sell their own ads). It's not as if anyone is forcing publishers to not deal directly with buyers. The exchanges certainly don't have the market power to do so.
    - buboard 7y ago
      e.g. when facebook took the page followers that people worked to acquire, and made them pay for users who intently subscribed to them, that was undestandable from a revenue-generating side, but unethical. Also when google forces people to pay the google tax.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Modern online advertising is more unethical, so shrug
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
buboard 7y ago
If people aren't willing to look at ads, what will news articles become? ads. What will HN comments become? Ads (many blog posts already are). Advertising covers a need
- have_faith 7y ago
  I know advertising covers a need, there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense. News organisations do not offer anything of consistent high quality that people are willing to pay for though. I have no faith that quality will improve if only we all switched off our adblockers and clicked some ads. People's propensity to read clickbait will not decline as a result of higher revenue from advertising. Most people aren't willing to pay for news because most news is worthless. > what will news articles become? ads This has already been the case for a while. I hope ad-blockers push them so far from legitimacy that they actually die off somewhat. When they had ad revenue bottom of the barrel "news" could survive regardless of the market not wanting to give them any money directly.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > quality that people are willing to pay for though You 're only talking about news sites. While they are the loudest to complain, most of the web traffic is not news sites, but sites with immense amounts of valuable information, most of which is not compensated well. The only one who gets compensated well is Google, and we should change that. Businesses are constantly willing to give money for advertising, and they will do that even if 100% of users use adblocking. That is a 0.5 trillion industry which is a great fit for attention-grabbing media, from printed press to the internet. It's not going away. It's just broken, largely because of centralized tracking, and we have to fix that.
    - have_faith 7y ago
      I didn't just mean news sites, they are a good example though. There is a lot of sites out there with very valuable information, I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though? but I might be mis-interpreting what you mean. More specifically I don't think encouraging these valuable sites to survive on new ad driven or donation modals is pragmatic, especially one backed by a crypto like BAT. If I create high value content and put it online for free I don't think it's fair I then complain that it doesn't generate enough revenue through ads. I would rather the content not be given to me for free in the first place.
bilbo0s 7y ago
In all honesty, I'm not sure how I feel about this model? I'm one of those people who has been out saying that the web needs a new business model. Well, here one is, and yet I find myself a bit hesitant to embrace it? It's probably just a matter of needing more information to fill in the blanks and explain the contradictions. That said, my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game, and I'm uncertain how valuable people who have to be paid to look at ads are to advertisers? I mean, Certainly some advertisers would still be interested. But enough to displace the current model? I'm just not sure.
- have_faith 7y ago
  > my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game Ditto. The long game seems to be to become an alternative Google of sorts. In the sense that Brave becomes the ad delivery middle man to every web user like Google and FB currently is. With regards to the current business model, I don't think it's broken at all. What is broken is the expectation that because users find most internet content so worthless that they wouldn't ever consider paying for it that some alternative revenue modal surely exists to keep the current system afloat. It's a flawed assumption. These new ad modals are just lipstick on a pig. The underlining product is already not valued enough to charge for (like crappy news articles and hastily written blog posts). No new monetisation modal will fix it.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Another perspective is that people don't want to pay for content, because we've been brainwashed to get content for free. For example in the press high quality investigative journalism is dying because people would rather get stuff for free and it's much cheaper to pick up stories from somewhere else and give it a sensationalist title. It's why online newspapers are struggling because people would rather read shitty blogs written by quacks promoting alt-truths, for free, than pay $2 per month.
- bad_user 7y ago
  > the web needs a new business model Business model for whom? For Brave? Or for the website owner? If the website owner isn't involved in this choice, then this is racketeering. And racketeering is an old business model.
the_duke 7y ago
I'm skeptical of the model too, and have no intention of using Brave. But: you can also not enable ads and buy BATs yourself. This gives you a single system to distribute donations to content you enjoy. Which is actually quite an interesting concept, since it is low effort/automatic for the user and yet allows small contributions. Of course it also gives Brave a potentially huge position of power, which is my biggest problem. If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit and not browser specific it would be more appealing.
- buboard 7y ago
  > gives Brave a potentially huge position of power But since BAT is an ERC token, how can they control who gives money to whom, and indeed do they even know that?
- djsumdog 7y ago
  > If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit Wasn't that the concept behind Flattr (minus the non-profit)
stefan_ 7y ago
The Brave approach seems to be the same as the infamous Adblock Plus, i.e. insert themselves as a middle-man between websites & ad networks on the one side and the user on the other and under the guise of "ethical ad blocking" extract a ransom.
- carlosdp 7y ago
  The difference with Brave is they also provide a mechanism to contribute those earned funds to sites you visit directly.
  - jamiequint 7y ago
    That doesn't make it more ethical. Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already. In any case, Brave's effective CPM that they pay out to publishers it complete shit even compared to bottom-of-the-barrel ad exchanges. It's objectively a bad deal for publishers.
    - buboard 7y ago
      It does make it more ethical. There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website, ads are pennies. > Brave's effective CPM You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. I like the fact that they are exploring new delivery technologies though
      - jamiequint 7y ago
        >There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website Huh? This is trivially easy with DFP or if you're smaller AdGlare/AdZerk/etc > You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. This is objectively false. OpenX, Amazon, Rubicon, AppNexus, Pubmatic, etc all pay better than Google for large pockets of inventory. Google has the largest distribution, but their CPMs are awful for a very large percentage of that inventory, even in typically high-CPM markets.

NelsonMinar 7y ago

Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.

fastball 7y ago
I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do. Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue. Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize. How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.
  - DHPersonal 7y ago
    I think you have a point, but the Brave Rewards program can also be seen as a redistribution system. For the sites that one wishes to support, one can choose to disable the ad-blocking system in Brave and see the standard ads. For the sites that are distributing bad advertisements, the ad-blocking system is useful and might be wise to enable. The in-browser ads then give a small funding to the user who sends it back to the sites that were unblocked, further increasing their revenue.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    > Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman. I think that's why they went with a cryptocurrency for payment. Brave isn't a middleman, or at least there's no technical reason why they have to be. Users pay publishers directly, using tokens that they earn from Brave in exchange for viewing ads.
  - KKPMW 7y ago
    But nobody is holding anything hostage. When you use Brave, you can opt-in to display ads on your Browser, and while doing so still get ads from Brave. So the choice to cut-off ads from the content publisher is yours. If you think it's unethical - just do not block the ads.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      Brave is holding the publisher's monetization hostage. Again, my issue is not with the user but with Brave.
      - fastball 7y ago
        But... they're not though. Ad-blocking in Brave (as it already exists in every other browser via plugins) is optional. Brave ads (a paradigm which doesn't exist in any other browser) are optional. You can disable both, enable both, or disable one and not the other. The choice is absolutely on the user and Brave isn't holding anything hostage.
- denismi 7y ago
  There's also: Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network It isn't clear to me from the website what happens if the publisher is unaware or unable or unwilling to claim revenue generated through this fringe browser's alternative revenue mechanism. Who ends up with that money? Is advertising even shown? Is the user aware of whether or not the publisher is in a position to claim revenues of the ads they're seeing? Depending on the answers to those questions, the addition of (2) could be worse for these publishers if it makes some users who otherwise would've (begrudgingly or otherwise) chosen option (0) feel morally justified in switching over to (2), converting their real (0)-derived revenues into unrealised (2)-derived theoretical revenues.
  - jancsika 7y ago
    > Option 0. block no ads, publishers receive all of the applicable revenue from their preferred network Unfortunately, that is likely not an optimally ethical reference state for the browser. Navigating with no ad blocker leaves the user open to all kinds of nasty tracking, auto-loading, and general trickery. When taken together that shady behavior can be seen by a reasonable person to outweigh the benefits of maximizing revenue for the user's favorite sites. Case in point: if I want to open a pdf music score from IMSLP, IMSLP displays an ad with the prominent text "Download PDF" in it. If I follow the ad it eventually prompts me to install a Chrome extension. Do you think it's wise to install that extension? In general I trust that IMSLP is an ethical site-- after all, they've spent a lot of effort to ensure that nobody downloads a score that is still under copyright in the country where the user is located. Did they forget to check a box to disallow misleading ads for their site? If there's no such checkbox "preferred network" is quite a euphemism and the correct/ethical reference state for browsers is with ublock origin installed. Edit: just to be clear-- 2 could still be worse than 1 depending on how Brave browser behaves. But for most practical uses of the web by non-technical users, your 0 is almost always a worse ethical choice than 1.
  - nilkn 7y ago
    Option 0 is no longer an option because ads are no longer just ads. They are malicious trackers that collect as much data about you as possible and sell it all over the place. It's unethical for a site to even host such "ads" as a method of monetization.
mrzimmerman 7y ago
I've been using Brave for a few months and I've never seen it substitute it's own ads within any applications or websites. It instead uses MacOS notifications to show ads which open new browser tabs when you click on them. So it does block ads entirely and then shows it's own ads through a separate channel.
buboard 7y ago
The idea is to nudge advertisers and publishers towards a more transparent model without middlemen. Unethical is what's happening today, with middlemen making obscene profits. It's more like civil disobedience than unethical.
- jamiequint 7y ago
  Middlemen are not ipso facto unethical. The publishers have voluntarily opted-in to ad exchanges because those exchanges provide value by aggregating demand in a way that would be difficult for all but the largest publishers to do themselves (and the largest publishers do, which is why FB/Google/Snap/Twitter/etc all sell their own ads). It's not as if anyone is forcing publishers to not deal directly with buyers. The exchanges certainly don't have the market power to do so.
  - buboard 7y ago
    e.g. when facebook took the page followers that people worked to acquire, and made them pay for users who intently subscribed to them, that was undestandable from a revenue-generating side, but unethical. Also when google forces people to pay the google tax.
cwkoss 7y ago
Modern online advertising is more unethical, so shrug
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

buboard 7y ago

If people aren't willing to look at ads, what will news articles become? ads. What will HN comments become? Ads (many blog posts already are). Advertising covers a need

have_faith 7y ago
I know advertising covers a need, there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising in an academic sense. News organisations do not offer anything of consistent high quality that people are willing to pay for though. I have no faith that quality will improve if only we all switched off our adblockers and clicked some ads. People's propensity to read clickbait will not decline as a result of higher revenue from advertising. Most people aren't willing to pay for news because most news is worthless. > what will news articles become? ads This has already been the case for a while. I hope ad-blockers push them so far from legitimacy that they actually die off somewhat. When they had ad revenue bottom of the barrel "news" could survive regardless of the market not wanting to give them any money directly.
- buboard 7y ago
  > quality that people are willing to pay for though You 're only talking about news sites. While they are the loudest to complain, most of the web traffic is not news sites, but sites with immense amounts of valuable information, most of which is not compensated well. The only one who gets compensated well is Google, and we should change that. Businesses are constantly willing to give money for advertising, and they will do that even if 100% of users use adblocking. That is a 0.5 trillion industry which is a great fit for attention-grabbing media, from printed press to the internet. It's not going away. It's just broken, largely because of centralized tracking, and we have to fix that.
  - have_faith 7y ago
    I didn't just mean news sites, they are a good example though. There is a lot of sites out there with very valuable information, I'm not convinced that they inherently need compensating though? but I might be mis-interpreting what you mean. More specifically I don't think encouraging these valuable sites to survive on new ad driven or donation modals is pragmatic, especially one backed by a crypto like BAT. If I create high value content and put it online for free I don't think it's fair I then complain that it doesn't generate enough revenue through ads. I would rather the content not be given to me for free in the first place.

bilbo0s 7y ago

In all honesty, I'm not sure how I feel about this model? I'm one of those people who has been out saying that the web needs a new business model. Well, here one is, and yet I find myself a bit hesitant to embrace it? It's probably just a matter of needing more information to fill in the blanks and explain the contradictions. That said, my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game, and I'm uncertain how valuable people who have to be paid to look at ads are to advertisers? I mean, Certainly some advertisers would still be interested. But enough to displace the current model? I'm just not sure.

have_faith 7y ago
> my mind tends to automatically start strategizing the long game Ditto. The long game seems to be to become an alternative Google of sorts. In the sense that Brave becomes the ad delivery middle man to every web user like Google and FB currently is. With regards to the current business model, I don't think it's broken at all. What is broken is the expectation that because users find most internet content so worthless that they wouldn't ever consider paying for it that some alternative revenue modal surely exists to keep the current system afloat. It's a flawed assumption. These new ad modals are just lipstick on a pig. The underlining product is already not valued enough to charge for (like crappy news articles and hastily written blog posts). No new monetisation modal will fix it.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Another perspective is that people don't want to pay for content, because we've been brainwashed to get content for free. For example in the press high quality investigative journalism is dying because people would rather get stuff for free and it's much cheaper to pick up stories from somewhere else and give it a sensationalist title. It's why online newspapers are struggling because people would rather read shitty blogs written by quacks promoting alt-truths, for free, than pay $2 per month.
bad_user 7y ago
> the web needs a new business model Business model for whom? For Brave? Or for the website owner? If the website owner isn't involved in this choice, then this is racketeering. And racketeering is an old business model.

the_duke 7y ago

I'm skeptical of the model too, and have no intention of using Brave. But: you can also not enable ads and buy BATs yourself. This gives you a single system to distribute donations to content you enjoy. Which is actually quite an interesting concept, since it is low effort/automatic for the user and yet allows small contributions. Of course it also gives Brave a potentially huge position of power, which is my biggest problem. If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit and not browser specific it would be more appealing.

buboard 7y ago
> gives Brave a potentially huge position of power But since BAT is an ERC token, how can they control who gives money to whom, and indeed do they even know that?
djsumdog 7y ago
> If the BAT system was run by a independent non-profit Wasn't that the concept behind Flattr (minus the non-profit)

stefan_ 7y ago

The Brave approach seems to be the same as the infamous Adblock Plus, i.e. insert themselves as a middle-man between websites & ad networks on the one side and the user on the other and under the guise of "ethical ad blocking" extract a ransom.

carlosdp 7y ago
The difference with Brave is they also provide a mechanism to contribute those earned funds to sites you visit directly.
- jamiequint 7y ago
  That doesn't make it more ethical. Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already. In any case, Brave's effective CPM that they pay out to publishers it complete shit even compared to bottom-of-the-barrel ad exchanges. It's objectively a bad deal for publishers.
  - buboard 7y ago
    It does make it more ethical. There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website, ads are pennies. > Brave's effective CPM You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. I like the fact that they are exploring new delivery technologies though
    - jamiequint 7y ago
      >There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website Huh? This is trivially easy with DFP or if you're smaller AdGlare/AdZerk/etc > You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs. This is objectively false. OpenX, Amazon, Rubicon, AppNexus, Pubmatic, etc all pay better than Google for large pockets of inventory. Google has the largest distribution, but their CPMs are awful for a very large percentage of that inventory, even in typically high-CPM markets.