9 ms·

Total number of Brave Browser Publishers

88 points by vicnicius 6y ago

andybak 6y ago
I don't understand "publisher" in this context. Anyone?
- aloknnikhil 6y ago
  I think it's easier to understand the context if you replace "publishers" with "content producers".
  - vicnicius 6y ago
    Yeah. They use Creators on Brave's website: https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/
  - BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
    I signed up. Basically just put my url into their form and verified my Email. Did it last year and absolutely nothing came of it. Its an email list is all.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Does your URL get much traffic?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  A long time ago there used to be more websites than facebook, google and youtube. They were called publishers.
  - andybak 6y ago
    Yes. I understand what "publisher" means in the context of the web. But it prepending "Brave Browser" that makes the word hard to comprehend for me in this case.
vicnicius 6y ago
Although I do not believe in Brave's model, it is interesting to see their publishers' growth. It is impossible to judge it objectively, but if such change would happen to be organic, I'd start questioning my belief a bit more.
- sct202 6y ago
  It's not hard to sign up as a publisher you just need an email and have to verify the channel.
soulmerge 6y ago
I tried visiting several of the websites, youtube channels, github accounts and vimeo accounts listed in the footer, but none of them contained any content.
buro9 6y ago
I have 250k monthly users who are very addicted to the sites I run, my sites are their #1 destination. I've even encouraged people to use Brave (and Firefox) as I'm for any browser that improves privacy and easily allows a NoScript experience with per-site exceptions built right into the main browser bar (it's even easier than using NoScript in Firefox). From that... barely $10-20 per month. I simply don't believe that Brave users are actively topping up BAT so that it's distributed. Instead I put a PayPal donate button on one of the websites - no target published, no progress, just a dumb button on the home page and to the side. That single donate button gets ~$500 per month and is enough to cover most of the costs associated with running all of the websites. I still think the best way to provide a good, ad-free, tracking-free service - is to ask your users to contribute what they feel the value is. NB: This is not my job, I'm pretty sure I could make a lot more money if I cared to but this is a side project and done with no need for profit. Meeting costs is all I'm going for - BAT is not going to do that and my costs are low for what I serve.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  I m actively promoting brave -- most users are using adblockers anyway, so why not promote a better system. BAT payments are still too small . That's inevitable considering how difficult it is to get started with a crypto wallet compared to paypal where tons of people already have accounts. I am hopeful that crypto payments catch on though.
- synthmeat 6y ago
  Just as another data-point... ~250k monthly unique users, as well as actively promoting it (to the point where they make up ~15% of users) and it's bringing ~$500/mo. Slightly unrelated, it's been a bit of a pain to have all the site features - mostly related to Canvas API - work for Brave users, since fair amount of them are absent in Brave due to their fingerprinting potential.
  - d0gbread 6y ago
    The difference may be those with auto contribute vs those that directly contribute. I have auto contribute off because I don't see much benefit if I can choose to directly contribute to those that I felt created great content, not just happened to have decent SEO.
jeremiahlee 6y ago
I don’t earn much from either, but I’ve earned about twice as much from Brave as I have from Coil. I support the open Web Monetization standard more, so I hope more publishers add a tag. https://coil.com/creator https://coil.com/creator
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
These statistics are fairly useless without knowing how much these creators/publishers are making by signing up. If the median income is close to 0, then what's the point.
spiderfarmer 6y ago
A large amount of people who use Brave installed it for the ad blocker. They have no problem depraving well-meaning publishers of quality content of the only viable way to monetise it. Expecting those people to pay up is a pipe dream. If Brave was fair it would enable publishers to block visitors who don't pay. Why is it fair to block ads, but unfair to block visitors?
- capableweb 6y ago
  > Why is it fair to block ads, but unfair to block visitors? Because the original idea behind the web was "Use your client to view content", meaning that you as a publisher publishes the content, users chose how to digest/view it. Hence browsers are "user-agents". Users should be able to decide how they want to view the content, that's why we have user css files that override website styling. Blocking visitors depending on how they chose to view the content, is unfair as you have published it on the internet, signalling you're fine with people using their user-agents to digest it.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    I'm not sure where its ever been said that every user agent must be served the same content. In fact, content negotiation is part of http.
    - spiderfarmer 6y ago
      Brave doesn't even have its own user agent.
  - ShinTakuya 6y ago
    Blocking users who block ads is no different to blocking users who don't have a premium account. Viewing ads is just a method of payment. In an ideal world all information would be free to everyone, but servers cost money. One way or another, servers need to be paid for. Donation models often allow for the most free distribution of info such as for Wikipedia. But it doesn't work for all cases. And in those cases, ads are often a good solution, since the information is still basically free. If you don't want to pay, that's fine. You can always visit another site that doesn't force payment. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm actually not against ad blocking. In fact, I use an ad blocker myself. I just think it's hypocritical to expect it to be okay to block ads without also accepting that sites can choose not to serve you (sometimes at their own business peril).
0vermorrow 6y ago
Are there any users here who actually ran Brave ad campaigns? I'm wondering what is your overall experience, how much of your ad campaign traffic were bots and how did it fare compared to other ad platforms.
renewiltord 6y ago
Brave did everything perfectly imho. You can't improve on the product for their market. If it works it'll establish a new model for funding. If it doesn't, we know there are lots of liars out there who said they'd pay if "some laundry list of unlikely requests".
- cinntaile 6y ago
  I'm putting my money on most of them being liars. I don't think they're deliberately lying. It's just that people tend to overestimate their willingness to pay when they don't actually have to put their money where their mouth is. This isn't really a new idea either, Flattr does pretty much the same thing as a chrome add-on so no need for cryptocurrencies or new browsers.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  One thing they could have done better is releasing a Firefox plugin that lets you do the same model but from Firefox... I like the model but I like Firefox more. Another thing that comes to mind is if it was possible for a "creator" to reward those that donated.
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  I find it very unlikely that the hundreds of billions currently being spent on internet advertising can be replaced with donations. I hate ads but there is no question that they pay the bills.
pmontra 6y ago
It's about Brave's Creators Program https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/ I forgot about it. Does it work only for people using Brave, right?
kyrers 6y ago
I'm starting to investigate Brave a little more. I read about it a long time ago but it seemed a "too-good-to-be-true" situation. The most recent articles I read on it list a considerable number of advantages, but then conclude against using it, simply considering it an ad company that does not pay content creators. I'm interested to know your opinions, and if you can point me to some useful resources, I would appreciate it. Thanks
- christophilus 6y ago
  It’s my daily driver. It’s great on iPhone, too. I recently had to poke around on my wife’s iPhone, and was amazed at how terrible the experience was in a normal browser.
  - kyrers 6y ago
    Privacy wise, it seems top notch, from what I've read. However, I don't understand their business model. This is what I understood so far, please correct me if I'm wrong: - They created 1.5M BATs; - Brave users can fund their wallet, or earn BATs by viewing ads; - Brave users can also tip the websites they visit; - Once a month, they will split the BATs I earned accordingly by each website I visited(is there proof this happens?); - Brave users will eventually be able to withdraw their BATs; I realize this is very simplified, please correct me if I'm wrong. How does Brave make money? I've read reports about Brave inserting refferal links in their homepage, but can't confirm this.
    - curryst 6y ago
      > Brave users can fund their wallet, or earn BATs by viewing ads; This is where the money making happens, and where actual money enters the BAT economy. Those BATs you get for watching ads have to come from somewhere; advertisers effectively pay for the BATs they give you with real money (I'm not positive whether the advertisers literally buy BAT to give you, or if they just pay Brave and Brave conjures them out of the air). My guess is that they'll make money on service fees on money entering or leaving BAT. Maybe a % service charge on advertisers buying BAT, or the same thing but on websites cashing out. I imagine they'll diversify and might make some income from referral links or other miscellaneous revenue streams, but I would expect the vast bulk of their revenue to relate directly to advertising and BAT.
merlinscholz 6y ago
If only there was a Brave version with a Gecko renderer it would be the perfect browser.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nicolas_t 6y ago
As much as I dislike Brendan Eich's politics, he would probably have been a better leader for Mozilla... At least, that monetization strategy makes more sense and should have been pursued by Mozilla.
jtbayly 6y ago
Why do they list Soundcloud, if the number is 0?
skee0083 6y ago
It's free money so it's no surprise publishers are growing, but that doesn't mean the Brave user base is growing along with it.
Nginx487 6y ago
I've been actively supporting Brave (and Firefox) exactly until moment I stumbled into very unexpected news about Brave. After that I support Firefox only. "Brave browser is asking for donations on behalf of other people" (2018) https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... "Brave browser is hijacking links and inserting affiliate codes" (2020) https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-is-hijacking-links-and-inserting-affiliate-codes/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we... Link to Brave source code on the Github, inserting affiliate codes into URLs https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/omnibox/browser/suggested_sites_provider_data.cc https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o... There's no valid reason to use a product, adopting totally unethical and scammer techniques. One more lesson on topic "If you don't pay, you're the product".
- Nginx487 6y ago
  Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

88 points by vicnicius 6y ago

andybak 6y ago

I don't understand "publisher" in this context. Anyone?

aloknnikhil 6y ago
I think it's easier to understand the context if you replace "publishers" with "content producers".
- vicnicius 6y ago
  Yeah. They use Creators on Brave's website: https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/
- BlueScreenDeath 6y ago
  I signed up. Basically just put my url into their form and verified my Email. Did it last year and absolutely nothing came of it. Its an email list is all.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Does your URL get much traffic?
cblconfederate 6y ago
A long time ago there used to be more websites than facebook, google and youtube. They were called publishers.
- andybak 6y ago
  Yes. I understand what "publisher" means in the context of the web. But it prepending "Brave Browser" that makes the word hard to comprehend for me in this case.

vicnicius 6y ago

Although I do not believe in Brave's model, it is interesting to see their publishers' growth. It is impossible to judge it objectively, but if such change would happen to be organic, I'd start questioning my belief a bit more.

sct202 6y ago
It's not hard to sign up as a publisher you just need an email and have to verify the channel.

soulmerge 6y ago

I tried visiting several of the websites, youtube channels, github accounts and vimeo accounts listed in the footer, but none of them contained any content.

buro9 6y ago

I have 250k monthly users who are very addicted to the sites I run, my sites are their #1 destination. I've even encouraged people to use Brave (and Firefox) as I'm for any browser that improves privacy and easily allows a NoScript experience with per-site exceptions built right into the main browser bar (it's even easier than using NoScript in Firefox). From that... barely $10-20 per month. I simply don't believe that Brave users are actively topping up BAT so that it's distributed. Instead I put a PayPal donate button on one of the websites - no target published, no progress, just a dumb button on the home page and to the side. That single donate button gets ~$500 per month and is enough to cover most of the costs associated with running all of the websites. I still think the best way to provide a good, ad-free, tracking-free service - is to ask your users to contribute what they feel the value is. NB: This is not my job, I'm pretty sure I could make a lot more money if I cared to but this is a side project and done with no need for profit. Meeting costs is all I'm going for - BAT is not going to do that and my costs are low for what I serve.

cblconfederate 6y ago
I m actively promoting brave -- most users are using adblockers anyway, so why not promote a better system. BAT payments are still too small . That's inevitable considering how difficult it is to get started with a crypto wallet compared to paypal where tons of people already have accounts. I am hopeful that crypto payments catch on though.
synthmeat 6y ago
Just as another data-point... ~250k monthly unique users, as well as actively promoting it (to the point where they make up ~15% of users) and it's bringing ~$500/mo. Slightly unrelated, it's been a bit of a pain to have all the site features - mostly related to Canvas API - work for Brave users, since fair amount of them are absent in Brave due to their fingerprinting potential.
- d0gbread 6y ago
  The difference may be those with auto contribute vs those that directly contribute. I have auto contribute off because I don't see much benefit if I can choose to directly contribute to those that I felt created great content, not just happened to have decent SEO.

jeremiahlee 6y ago

I don’t earn much from either, but I’ve earned about twice as much from Brave as I have from Coil. I support the open Web Monetization standard more, so I hope more publishers add a tag. https://coil.com/creator https://coil.com/creator

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

These statistics are fairly useless without knowing how much these creators/publishers are making by signing up. If the median income is close to 0, then what's the point.

spiderfarmer 6y ago

A large amount of people who use Brave installed it for the ad blocker. They have no problem depraving well-meaning publishers of quality content of the only viable way to monetise it. Expecting those people to pay up is a pipe dream. If Brave was fair it would enable publishers to block visitors who don't pay. Why is it fair to block ads, but unfair to block visitors?

capableweb 6y ago
> Why is it fair to block ads, but unfair to block visitors? Because the original idea behind the web was "Use your client to view content", meaning that you as a publisher publishes the content, users chose how to digest/view it. Hence browsers are "user-agents". Users should be able to decide how they want to view the content, that's why we have user css files that override website styling. Blocking visitors depending on how they chose to view the content, is unfair as you have published it on the internet, signalling you're fine with people using their user-agents to digest it.
- true_religion 6y ago
  I'm not sure where its ever been said that every user agent must be served the same content. In fact, content negotiation is part of http.
  - spiderfarmer 6y ago
    Brave doesn't even have its own user agent.
- ShinTakuya 6y ago
  Blocking users who block ads is no different to blocking users who don't have a premium account. Viewing ads is just a method of payment. In an ideal world all information would be free to everyone, but servers cost money. One way or another, servers need to be paid for. Donation models often allow for the most free distribution of info such as for Wikipedia. But it doesn't work for all cases. And in those cases, ads are often a good solution, since the information is still basically free. If you don't want to pay, that's fine. You can always visit another site that doesn't force payment. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm actually not against ad blocking. In fact, I use an ad blocker myself. I just think it's hypocritical to expect it to be okay to block ads without also accepting that sites can choose not to serve you (sometimes at their own business peril).

0vermorrow 6y ago

Are there any users here who actually ran Brave ad campaigns? I'm wondering what is your overall experience, how much of your ad campaign traffic were bots and how did it fare compared to other ad platforms.

renewiltord 6y ago

Brave did everything perfectly imho. You can't improve on the product for their market. If it works it'll establish a new model for funding. If it doesn't, we know there are lots of liars out there who said they'd pay if "some laundry list of unlikely requests".

cinntaile 6y ago
I'm putting my money on most of them being liars. I don't think they're deliberately lying. It's just that people tend to overestimate their willingness to pay when they don't actually have to put their money where their mouth is. This isn't really a new idea either, Flattr does pretty much the same thing as a chrome add-on so no need for cryptocurrencies or new browsers.
0-_-0 6y ago
One thing they could have done better is releasing a Firefox plugin that lets you do the same model but from Firefox... I like the model but I like Firefox more. Another thing that comes to mind is if it was possible for a "creator" to reward those that donated.
AniseAbyss 6y ago
I find it very unlikely that the hundreds of billions currently being spent on internet advertising can be replaced with donations. I hate ads but there is no question that they pay the bills.

pmontra 6y ago

It's about Brave's Creators Program https://creators.brave.com/ https://creators.brave.com/ I forgot about it. Does it work only for people using Brave, right?

kyrers 6y ago

I'm starting to investigate Brave a little more. I read about it a long time ago but it seemed a "too-good-to-be-true" situation. The most recent articles I read on it list a considerable number of advantages, but then conclude against using it, simply considering it an ad company that does not pay content creators. I'm interested to know your opinions, and if you can point me to some useful resources, I would appreciate it. Thanks

christophilus 6y ago
It’s my daily driver. It’s great on iPhone, too. I recently had to poke around on my wife’s iPhone, and was amazed at how terrible the experience was in a normal browser.
- kyrers 6y ago
  Privacy wise, it seems top notch, from what I've read. However, I don't understand their business model. This is what I understood so far, please correct me if I'm wrong: - They created 1.5M BATs; - Brave users can fund their wallet, or earn BATs by viewing ads; - Brave users can also tip the websites they visit; - Once a month, they will split the BATs I earned accordingly by each website I visited(is there proof this happens?); - Brave users will eventually be able to withdraw their BATs; I realize this is very simplified, please correct me if I'm wrong. How does Brave make money? I've read reports about Brave inserting refferal links in their homepage, but can't confirm this.
  - curryst 6y ago
    > Brave users can fund their wallet, or earn BATs by viewing ads; This is where the money making happens, and where actual money enters the BAT economy. Those BATs you get for watching ads have to come from somewhere; advertisers effectively pay for the BATs they give you with real money (I'm not positive whether the advertisers literally buy BAT to give you, or if they just pay Brave and Brave conjures them out of the air). My guess is that they'll make money on service fees on money entering or leaving BAT. Maybe a % service charge on advertisers buying BAT, or the same thing but on websites cashing out. I imagine they'll diversify and might make some income from referral links or other miscellaneous revenue streams, but I would expect the vast bulk of their revenue to relate directly to advertising and BAT.

merlinscholz 6y ago

If only there was a Brave version with a Gecko renderer it would be the perfect browser.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nicolas_t 6y ago

As much as I dislike Brendan Eich's politics, he would probably have been a better leader for Mozilla... At least, that monetization strategy makes more sense and should have been pursued by Mozilla.

jtbayly 6y ago

Why do they list Soundcloud, if the number is 0?

skee0083 6y ago

It's free money so it's no surprise publishers are growing, but that doesn't mean the Brave user base is growing along with it.

Nginx487 6y ago

I've been actively supporting Brave (and Firefox) exactly until moment I stumbled into very unexpected news about Brave. After that I support Firefox only. "Brave browser is asking for donations on behalf of other people" (2018) https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... "Brave browser is hijacking links and inserting affiliate codes" (2020) https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-is-hijacking-links-and-inserting-affiliate-codes/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we... Link to Brave source code on the Github, inserting affiliate codes into URLs https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/omnibox/browser/suggested_sites_provider_data.cc https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o... There's no valid reason to use a product, adopting totally unethical and scammer techniques. One more lesson on topic "If you don't pay, you're the product".

Nginx487 6y ago
Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027