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That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of its users (the same users who were installing

That's not how it works. Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are known to be dangerous) on behalf of its users (the same users who were installing uBlock Origin in Chrome and Firefox before coming to Brave). This is a security and privacy necessity on the Web today. Users are then able to opt-in, if they like, to a novel advertising platform within the Brave ecosystem. These users can earn rewards for their attention (70% of the associated ad-revenue). Ads are displayed within Brave and on the user's desktop; ads are not displayed in any publisher-owned space (e.g. a website or YouTube channel). With these rewards, users are able to contribute to [verified] sites, channels, etc. The publisher/content-creator must already be verified to receive any rewards from users. If a user attempts to contribute to a non-verified site, the tokens remain on the user's device for up to 90 days. This isn't much different from how PayPal allows you to send money to an arbitrary email address, regardless if it is associated with a verified PayPal account or not. This model simply addresses the problem of blocking harmful ads and trackers, while offering no alternative means of supporting those same content creators.

smoldesu 5y ago
We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place. Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.
- mapgrep 5y ago
  Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165358155922059266 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google. On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance. Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        At this point, I think I'm more comfortable with Google getting my data than Brave. Thanks for the help!
        gr3pls 5y ago
        Ah yes, brand good
      - 5y ago
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models: 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution. and 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to support content creators. And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My current options are the following: 1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo or 2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don't like their browser. I think I'm good.
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      Happy to hear that you're staying safe online. Nobody is tracking you down though. You and I happen to be on the same page, engaging in conversation. Check my comment history and you'll see that you make up only a small fraction of the individuals to whom I have responded. All the best to you though; sincerely wish you well.
      - distrill 5y ago
        You have more patience than I would have had in this thread. I guess it's your job to be patient though, or at least to deal with occasionally nasty elements of the community.
    - rpdillon 5y ago
      Is Vivaldi open source? The only reason I don't use it is because it's closed, so this would be great news!
jay_kyburz 5y ago
Hi Jonathan, here is my hot take on the issue. When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things. When Brave blocks ads in one place, but shows others ads instead, the users are not actually protected from the ads, any potential money that may have been generated by the ads is effectively stolen by Brave. It's smells to us like you are just stealing peoples content.
- distrill 5y ago
  > When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things I'm not sure where you're getting this statistic. Most people that I know, myself included, aren't trying to protect themselves from buying things, rather from annoying ads that clutter everything up and slow everything down. Perhaps brave isn't the best choice for you, but it certainly will be a good choice for a lot of people who are currently using adblockers.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I didn't quote any statistics. Perhaps I should have said, "some users" or I could have said "users are also protected from manipulation". I think if you thought about it for a while you would object to a constant bombardment of messages that you are not cool enough, or popular enough, or attractive enough, or fit enough. Or that when you searched for things you were shown the "best results" rather than whoever paid google the most for your attention. Or if you were thinking of buying a thing one day, but decided not to because you decided you didn't need it, you might prefer not to be constantly convinced to change your mind and buy the thing. Buy the THING! My iPad is too old for an ad blocker so I have to suffer constant abuse when surfing the web on it. Don't get me started on Apple.
  - approxim8ion 5y ago
    I'm part of the group GP refers to. I have no interest in ads. I might even be aggressively against them in most contexts. At best, they are a nagging distraction, and worst they are manipulation. I understand the value they bring to creators but where possible I opt for subscriptions or donations rather than ads, and have very few qualms about it.
55555 5y ago
Where can I buy these (banners?) and what's the min daily budget? I'm skeptical this will work long term as you're overlapping two of the worst sources of traffic: technically-inclined users and incentived attention. Would love to test it out for fun.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I would be interested to know what the conversion rate is like. Given users are literately paid to watch the ads, I'm sure it would be terrible. Worse even than a game were users have to watch an ad to get some in game currency.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    CTR is at about 9% right now (industry is about 2%). The difference here is that the user gets to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree (up to 10 ad notifications per hour presently). Ads are selected via a machine-learning component on the user's device, so with greater diversity of advertisers and inventory, relevancy increases. And, users are rewarded NOT for their clicks, but rather for their attention. If an ad notification appears, and is ignored, you're still rewarded 70% of the associated revenue.
xgulfie 5y ago
You've hit the nail on the head calling it the basic attention token. While you haven't literally replaced ads in the page you are still removing their ads then adding your own. You didn't replace the ad directly, but you've redirected the user's attention.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Brave blocks harmful third-party ads and trackers. This is a security and privacy matter, as these types of ads are actually small scripts/apps which run in the context of your local machine. As malignant as third-party ads have become, they do generate revenue for content creators. As such, Brave didn't stop at "block, and let the creators figure it out." We did the work to propose a new approach to supporting content creators; one which doesn't cost the user their data/privacy in the process. In Brave, user's have to opt-in to Ad Notifications. When they do, they set the limits (up to 10/hr) on how many ad notifications can be displayed. Matching happens locally, so the user's data never leaves their device. And 70% of each ad's revenue is allocated to the user's anonymous wallet, which can flow out to the sites they visit (and proportional to the amount of time they spend on those sites) each month. This is indeed a replacement model; we cannot continue down the path we've been taking for 25 years. One which treats users like products, harvesting their data at every turn, and auctioning them off to a sea of third parties. There's a better way, and we're just seeing the start of it with the Brave model.
  - boinkyboinnk 5y ago
    Keep digging.

smoldesu 5y ago

We don't care what it does with the previous ad data, what's disturbing is that there is even a setting to opt-in to more ads in the first place. Many people (myself included) will be completely turned away because of that option. That's just the cost of doing business.

mapgrep 5y ago
Person 1: Brave replaces existing ads, that’s bad Someone from Brave: actually we don’t replace existing ads at all, here’s why Person 2: no one cares what you do or don’t do with existing ads! I don’t have any connection to Brave but I find it odd they’ve become some kind of hate figure here on HN. Their iOS client IMO is quite good. Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. But merely by trying to be privacy first they get crap for not always being perfect. See also: Signal, OpenPGP, Firefox.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Their privacy is miles ahead of the other options. If by "other options" you're purely referring to "the 5 most popular browsers", you're mostly right. Brave still uses much more telemetry than UnGoogled Chromium and Vivaldi, so make of that what you will.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    I reviewed Vivaldi back in 2019 on Twitter (see https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165358155922059266 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11653581559220592...), and later again for an official blog post (see https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traffic-results/ https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...). It was indeed much better than many of the other top browsers. Brave does, however, still come out on top when you consider Vivaldi proxies few, if any, requests to Google. On the topic of telemetry, I just updated it and launched a new window to find an immediate call to vialdi.com/rep/rep passing along 25 distinct pieces of information, including what appears to be a distinct 16-character ID (key: _id). Another 6-character ID (key: pv_id) was also passed along for the ride. I'd have to take a closer look into the traffic to determine how sticky these are to the user, device, or browser instance. Anybody interested can download Telerik Fiddler (or the HTTP Toolkit) and conduct a cursory review of the network activity as well. Vivaldi does still come out near the top of the list of browsers though. For example, they don't send keystrokes to Google or Bing behind the scenes as you type. That's a unique restraint not commonly observed in browsers today.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      At this point, I think I'm more comfortable with Google getting my data than Brave. Thanks for the help!
      - gr3pls 5y ago
        Ah yes, brand good
    - 5y ago
jonathansampson 5y ago
We're discussing 2 distinctly different ad models: 1) Forced upon the user, rewards them in no way for their attention, harvests their data, auctions them off to a sea of third-parties, and may in fact be dropping malicious scripts onto their machine for client-site execution. and 2) An opt-in model which harvests no user data, rewards users with 70% of the revenue for the ads they choose to view (the user controls frequency caps), and gives everybody (not just the wealthy or well-off) a way to support content creators. And you feel the second one is the "disturbing" model?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  As much as I know you want to chime in here, I'm not going to play any games where you draw the goalposts. My current options are the following: 1. I can continue to use Vivaldi and uBlock origin as a completely open-source and so far flawless combo or 2. Go out of my way to switch to a browser with dubious privacy claims, a goddamn personal cryptocurrency and (the cherry on top) a developer who spent the better half of his afternoon tracking me down and asking me why I don't like their browser. I think I'm good.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Happy to hear that you're staying safe online. Nobody is tracking you down though. You and I happen to be on the same page, engaging in conversation. Check my comment history and you'll see that you make up only a small fraction of the individuals to whom I have responded. All the best to you though; sincerely wish you well.
    - distrill 5y ago
      You have more patience than I would have had in this thread. I guess it's your job to be patient though, or at least to deal with occasionally nasty elements of the community.
  - rpdillon 5y ago
    Is Vivaldi open source? The only reason I don't use it is because it's closed, so this would be great news!

jay_kyburz 5y ago

Hi Jonathan, here is my hot take on the issue. When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things. When Brave blocks ads in one place, but shows others ads instead, the users are not actually protected from the ads, any potential money that may have been generated by the ads is effectively stolen by Brave. It's smells to us like you are just stealing peoples content.

distrill 5y ago
> When a user installs uBlock Origin, they are attempting to protect themselves from ads, not just privacy, but because the ads themselves attempt to manipulate them into buying things I'm not sure where you're getting this statistic. Most people that I know, myself included, aren't trying to protect themselves from buying things, rather from annoying ads that clutter everything up and slow everything down. Perhaps brave isn't the best choice for you, but it certainly will be a good choice for a lot of people who are currently using adblockers.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I didn't quote any statistics. Perhaps I should have said, "some users" or I could have said "users are also protected from manipulation". I think if you thought about it for a while you would object to a constant bombardment of messages that you are not cool enough, or popular enough, or attractive enough, or fit enough. Or that when you searched for things you were shown the "best results" rather than whoever paid google the most for your attention. Or if you were thinking of buying a thing one day, but decided not to because you decided you didn't need it, you might prefer not to be constantly convinced to change your mind and buy the thing. Buy the THING! My iPad is too old for an ad blocker so I have to suffer constant abuse when surfing the web on it. Don't get me started on Apple.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  I'm part of the group GP refers to. I have no interest in ads. I might even be aggressively against them in most contexts. At best, they are a nagging distraction, and worst they are manipulation. I understand the value they bring to creators but where possible I opt for subscriptions or donations rather than ads, and have very few qualms about it.

55555 5y ago

Where can I buy these (banners?) and what's the min daily budget? I'm skeptical this will work long term as you're overlapping two of the worst sources of traffic: technically-inclined users and incentived attention. Would love to test it out for fun.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I would be interested to know what the conversion rate is like. Given users are literately paid to watch the ads, I'm sure it would be terrible. Worse even than a game were users have to watch an ad to get some in game currency.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  CTR is at about 9% right now (industry is about 2%). The difference here is that the user gets to decide whether or not they participate, and to what degree (up to 10 ad notifications per hour presently). Ads are selected via a machine-learning component on the user's device, so with greater diversity of advertisers and inventory, relevancy increases. And, users are rewarded NOT for their clicks, but rather for their attention. If an ad notification appears, and is ignored, you're still rewarded 70% of the associated revenue.

xgulfie 5y ago

You've hit the nail on the head calling it the basic attention token. While you haven't literally replaced ads in the page you are still removing their ads then adding your own. You didn't replace the ad directly, but you've redirected the user's attention.

jonathansampson 5y ago
Brave blocks harmful third-party ads and trackers. This is a security and privacy matter, as these types of ads are actually small scripts/apps which run in the context of your local machine. As malignant as third-party ads have become, they do generate revenue for content creators. As such, Brave didn't stop at "block, and let the creators figure it out." We did the work to propose a new approach to supporting content creators; one which doesn't cost the user their data/privacy in the process. In Brave, user's have to opt-in to Ad Notifications. When they do, they set the limits (up to 10/hr) on how many ad notifications can be displayed. Matching happens locally, so the user's data never leaves their device. And 70% of each ad's revenue is allocated to the user's anonymous wallet, which can flow out to the sites they visit (and proportional to the amount of time they spend on those sites) each month. This is indeed a replacement model; we cannot continue down the path we've been taking for 25 years. One which treats users like products, harvesting their data at every turn, and auctioning them off to a sea of third parties. There's a better way, and we're just seeing the start of it with the Brave model.
- boinkyboinnk 5y ago
  Keep digging.