8 ms·

Brave launches self-serve ads program

113 points by jarsin 4y ago

_23sd 4y ago
I wonder if this will result in more diversity of ads, or more of the same. As a Brave user, the concept of automatically supporting websites and creators is interesting, but I don’t like seeing scammy crypto/web3 ads so I disabled them before long.
- lopatin 4y ago
  My intuition is that it will not change. I feel like there are two classes of people who use Brave: 1. Hype driven people who crypto ads work well on. 2. Privacy driven tech people who are pretty much non-monetizable. Self-service ads are useful for small to medium-sized advertisers who want to target specific niches with pinpoint accuracy. If Brave's whole thing is that they protect your privacy from targeted ads, and also they lack the scale to be useful for non-generic ads, then I'm not sure any of this makes sense.
  - komali2 4y ago
    Why do you think privacy driven tech people are non monetizable? There's a whole hardware industry around built them for devices with audit trails and etc.
  - nothrowaways 4y ago
    If you are privacy driven tech person (class 2) you won't use brave at all.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      As a privacy driven tech person, I find brave to be semi cringe yet at the same time one of the few companies that is actually trying to innovate on an approachable set of mainstream, privacy focused tools, a web browser, search, and a (more) privacy preserving ads platform for the web. I don’t like everything that they do, but I respect the fact that they are actually trying things. Saying flat out that a privacy driven tech person wouldn’t use brave at all is reflective of the counterproductive discourse within the community, where every tool in existence fails someone’s purity test. Firefox, ddg, protonmail, etc have all had their scandals.
      - KyleBerezin 4y ago
        Tor for private browsing is a neat feature too. Obviously if you are doing stuff where tor is actually needed, you should be using a dedicated browser, but for 'I don't want to be put on a list' stuff it works great.
ThorsBane 4y ago
[flagged]
- _boffin_ 4y ago
  Please detail the ingredients of the hype juice you’re drinking. I think there’s something that causes hallucinations in there if you think that.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all. I'm perpetually on the edge of doing this but I haven't because I want - a way for sites to transparently "cite their sources" so that, for instance, the field-work guy gets paid, not just the writer. - more granular control over auto-contribute (implicit 1×, with a button to tweak to 5× or 0×) - community curation so if I 0× a site for being shady about how it got my attention, people who trust me will have it at 0× automatically - links to community 0×'ed and 5×'ed sites appear in different colors to cue trustworthyness before I even click links to them
- jarebear6expepj 4y ago
  They have no choice but to maintain focus on advertising. That's the whole schtick. Without it there is no product.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    I think the primary innovation is that they can distribute money in a way that is analogous to how attention is distributed. Getting that money from their ad business strikes me as a temporary necessary evil. I hope that the long term plan is to get people to recognize that a non-ad-funded-web is a better web so that we just pre-load our BAT wallets with $10 each month with the idea that it'll gradually go to the content creators as we browse. It's a bit of a leap from where we are today, but if anybody can make a culture shift like that happen, it's the content creators united behind a common cause. They're influential by definition. Also, in a soon-to-be-dominated-by-LLM's web, I think a steady trickle of BAT contributions to your site might be a reasonable component in a scheme that suggests to you that I'm a human user. Sure, bot makers can fake such a history, but it would be expensive for them to do so at scale. Hopefully something ZK something can be done to allow for this in a way that doesn't require me to also make my browsing habits public.
  - masukomi 4y ago
    I mean... their could ask people to pay for a quality product that protects their privacy and keeps ads out of their faces. You know, the old fashioned concept of making a product worth paying for and asking people to pay for it. And... I know this one is going to be even more controversial, use real money instead of inserting crypto into the mix for no good reason.
patchtopic 4y ago
I initially had good fun with brave and BAT, but the continual rug-pulling and changing the rules re: account verification, exchanges you can use, regions, with getting the "earned" BAT has made me give up as a big waste of time. Still a good security oriented browser, and I'm using it for that, just all the BAT/advertising stuff is not worth your time unless you like continually getting messed around with bureaucratic nonsense. and yes, I'm aware some of this may be driven by regulatory stuff outside of the brave browser peoples control.
- patchtopic 4y ago
  plus the exchanges they force you to use have had security issues, leaking my email out in a breach - whats the point of self custody cryptocurrency if BRAVE force me to provide my private ID information to insecure third parties?
- lalaland1125 4y ago
  > security oriented browser Is it actually though? Can you name one security vulnerability that Chrome had that Brave did not?
  - jhasse 4y ago
    Chrome shows ads.
celsoazevedo 4y ago
Unrelated, but my Brave Creators account was suspended 6 months ago. At least I think it was suspended 6 months ago, I only received a confirmation a few days ago because I asked. No specific reason given, apparently there's no way to appeal, and my sites are still shown as "verified" even though I can't access my account. Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while? I've praised them a few times here before, but the way they're handling this is just bad.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  > Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while? This is the same company that took (takes?) donations for people who aren't signed up at all, so I wouldn't count on it.
  - celsoazevedo 4y ago
    Apparently donations are returned to the sender after a while if the website/account owner doesn't claim it. The problem is that my sites are verified... are they keeping the money? No idea. I've asked them 5 days ago to remove/unverify the sites if they plan to keep my account suspended. No reply so far.
    - celsoazevedo 4y ago
      Update: They've replied. My sites/accounts are no longer verified. If someone from Brave reads this, perhaps verified sites/accounts should be removed when a Creators account is suspended?
ouid 4y ago
Another entirely earnest and enthusiastic step towards the "future" presented here: https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
msla 4y ago
Previously: > Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.c... > This warning is prompted by a company called Brave, who've been taking cryptocurrency donations "for me", using my name and photo, without my consent. I asked them not to, and to refund anyone who's donated; they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible". > I did ask Brave how keeping profiles on untold numbers of people and assigning donations to them without consent complied with GDPR, at which point the person talking to me stopped replying to emails.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Well, I mean, threatening legal action is going to result in silence from any even marginally competent company.
- KyleBerezin 4y ago
  This is old and no longer relevant. The new system is people can still donate to anyone, even people not registered as creators. The donated BAT sits around for a while so the person has time to register and receive the donations if they so choose. After so many days, if they do not accept, your BAT is automatically returned to you.
wkat4242 4y ago
I'm really surprised they are still pushing this BAT stuff. Who is willingly going to look at ads? At least make it possible to do it with money instead.
- KyleBerezin 4y ago
  I do, but you are not forced to look at ads, you can just turn it off. Also you can do it with money if you want.
AraceliHarker 4y ago
Brave is not so brave after all. It merely swaps other people’s ads for its own, like a thief in the night. A trick as old as AdBlock Plus.
- princevegeta89 4y ago
  Ublock Origin for the win. Block every shit that gets in the way.
- mackatap 4y ago
  I completely agree. It feels very dirty. You take away the source of income for the creators to earn an extra dollar for yourself.
  - mherrmann 4y ago
    s/to earn an extra dollar for yourself/to fund your project, in a privacy-preserving way, to make the internet a better place/.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      How many impressions would you need to cover even a $20 monthly hosting bill, never mind feed yourself or pay rent?
      - valrix 4y ago
        Out of genuine curiosity, I decided to run a few numbers to really find out what it would take for ads alone to support a website and the single developer (no family, no debts, just rent, food, utilities, and hosting). Hosting: $20/month Rent: $800/month (single room studio, if lucky enough to find one) Food: $200/month (likely should be higher due to recent inflation) Utilities: $150/month Total: $1370/month Typical PPM (Price Per Mille) for ads: $6/1000 ads = $0.006 $1370/$0.006 = ~228,333 ad impressions per month. You could reduce the number of required visitors by shoving more ads into the page (3 or more), but even with 3 ad impressions per visit, you'd still need about 76,166 visits each month. That's over 7,600 visits every single day!
plaguepilled 4y ago
I like Brave's Defaults (har har) in a lot of places but I am firmly against their monetisation schemes. There is an attitude among a lot of people in the founder space that "subscription models are what everyone says they want - but no one actually pays up". This is demonstrably false. Plenty of content creators are making modest but sustainable incomes via Patreon, even despite the skew towards the top 2% of creators. I think what the phrasing should be is, "I could make a modest income via the subscription model, but a notably higher income via other methods. Because this is my primary means of evaluating an approach, I therefore consider the subscription model unviable, assuming maximal competition." That would at least be more defensible if one could justify their concern that their sector is high-competition.
MisterSandman 4y ago
I will never understand the hype behind Brave. Why would I watch ads that give Brave a cut of the money, instead of watching ads that actually benefit the content I'm looking at?
- dbsmith83 4y ago
  Or a browser which forces you to update whether you want to or not
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Their ads are supposedly more privacy preserving, and also have some crypto mumbo jumbo involved
- TylerE 4y ago
  Because only one gets them VC money from crypto fomo.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    That's not factual. Neither Firefox nor Safari are based on chromium. There are a lot of forks though, i.e. Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and Edge
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      I said 99%. Safari is artificially pegged to iOS marketshare, it would cease to remain relevant if/when Apple's gatekeeping is relinquished. FireChrome is irrelevant so long as Mozilla is in charge, and its forks are even further irrelevant. The rest of the browser world is Chrome through and through.
      - TylerE 4y ago
        Safari has 17% of the global browser market.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 4y ago
Oh brave. Still fast on mobile but every day the cursed triangle of crypto in the corner nudges me a little further away.
- jhasse 4y ago
  You can disable it in the settings :)
PufPufPuf 4y ago
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Patreon give you the full value proposition of Brave while actually delivering on the promises. Stop promoting this scum.
- KyleBerezin 4y ago
  You seem to have a lot of hate for this browser, I'm interested to know why (for real, I am not being argumentative). I decided to give it a shot and I am enjoying it so far.

113 points by jarsin 4y ago

I wonder if this will result in more diversity of ads, or more of the same. As a Brave user, the concept of automatically supporting websites and creators is interesting, but I don’t like seeing scammy crypto/web3 ads so I disabled them before long.

lopatin 4y ago
My intuition is that it will not change. I feel like there are two classes of people who use Brave: 1. Hype driven people who crypto ads work well on. 2. Privacy driven tech people who are pretty much non-monetizable. Self-service ads are useful for small to medium-sized advertisers who want to target specific niches with pinpoint accuracy. If Brave's whole thing is that they protect your privacy from targeted ads, and also they lack the scale to be useful for non-generic ads, then I'm not sure any of this makes sense.
- komali2 4y ago
  Why do you think privacy driven tech people are non monetizable? There's a whole hardware industry around built them for devices with audit trails and etc.
- nothrowaways 4y ago
  If you are privacy driven tech person (class 2) you won't use brave at all.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    As a privacy driven tech person, I find brave to be semi cringe yet at the same time one of the few companies that is actually trying to innovate on an approachable set of mainstream, privacy focused tools, a web browser, search, and a (more) privacy preserving ads platform for the web. I don’t like everything that they do, but I respect the fact that they are actually trying things. Saying flat out that a privacy driven tech person wouldn’t use brave at all is reflective of the counterproductive discourse within the community, where every tool in existence fails someone’s purity test. Firefox, ddg, protonmail, etc have all had their scandals.
    - KyleBerezin 4y ago
      Tor for private browsing is a neat feature too. Obviously if you are doing stuff where tor is actually needed, you should be using a dedicated browser, but for 'I don't want to be put on a list' stuff it works great.

ThorsBane 4y ago

[flagged]

_boffin_ 4y ago
Please detail the ingredients of the hype juice you’re drinking. I think there’s something that causes hallucinations in there if you think that.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

I wish brave would focus less on attracting advertisers and more on the use case where people just buy BAT and let their browsers fund content creators from the wallet without having advertisers in the loop at all. I'm perpetually on the edge of doing this but I haven't because I want - a way for sites to transparently "cite their sources" so that, for instance, the field-work guy gets paid, not just the writer. - more granular control over auto-contribute (implicit 1×, with a button to tweak to 5× or 0×) - community curation so if I 0× a site for being shady about how it got my attention, people who trust me will have it at 0× automatically - links to community 0×'ed and 5×'ed sites appear in different colors to cue trustworthyness before I even click links to them

jarebear6expepj 4y ago
They have no choice but to maintain focus on advertising. That's the whole schtick. Without it there is no product.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I think the primary innovation is that they can distribute money in a way that is analogous to how attention is distributed. Getting that money from their ad business strikes me as a temporary necessary evil. I hope that the long term plan is to get people to recognize that a non-ad-funded-web is a better web so that we just pre-load our BAT wallets with $10 each month with the idea that it'll gradually go to the content creators as we browse. It's a bit of a leap from where we are today, but if anybody can make a culture shift like that happen, it's the content creators united behind a common cause. They're influential by definition. Also, in a soon-to-be-dominated-by-LLM's web, I think a steady trickle of BAT contributions to your site might be a reasonable component in a scheme that suggests to you that I'm a human user. Sure, bot makers can fake such a history, but it would be expensive for them to do so at scale. Hopefully something ZK something can be done to allow for this in a way that doesn't require me to also make my browsing habits public.
- masukomi 4y ago
  I mean... their could ask people to pay for a quality product that protects their privacy and keeps ads out of their faces. You know, the old fashioned concept of making a product worth paying for and asking people to pay for it. And... I know this one is going to be even more controversial, use real money instead of inserting crypto into the mix for no good reason.

patchtopic 4y ago

I initially had good fun with brave and BAT, but the continual rug-pulling and changing the rules re: account verification, exchanges you can use, regions, with getting the "earned" BAT has made me give up as a big waste of time. Still a good security oriented browser, and I'm using it for that, just all the BAT/advertising stuff is not worth your time unless you like continually getting messed around with bureaucratic nonsense. and yes, I'm aware some of this may be driven by regulatory stuff outside of the brave browser peoples control.

patchtopic 4y ago
plus the exchanges they force you to use have had security issues, leaking my email out in a breach - whats the point of self custody cryptocurrency if BRAVE force me to provide my private ID information to insecure third parties?
lalaland1125 4y ago
> security oriented browser Is it actually though? Can you name one security vulnerability that Chrome had that Brave did not?
- jhasse 4y ago
  Chrome shows ads.

celsoazevedo 4y ago

Unrelated, but my Brave Creators account was suspended 6 months ago. At least I think it was suspended 6 months ago, I only received a confirmation a few days ago because I asked. No specific reason given, apparently there's no way to appeal, and my sites are still shown as "verified" even though I can't access my account. Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while? I've praised them a few times here before, but the way they're handling this is just bad.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
> Brave users still think they're supporting me... hopefully on suspended accounts the BAT is returned to the sender after a while? This is the same company that took (takes?) donations for people who aren't signed up at all, so I wouldn't count on it.
- celsoazevedo 4y ago
  Apparently donations are returned to the sender after a while if the website/account owner doesn't claim it. The problem is that my sites are verified... are they keeping the money? No idea. I've asked them 5 days ago to remove/unverify the sites if they plan to keep my account suspended. No reply so far.
  - celsoazevedo 4y ago
    Update: They've replied. My sites/accounts are no longer verified. If someone from Brave reads this, perhaps verified sites/accounts should be removed when a Creators account is suspended?

ouid 4y ago

Another entirely earnest and enthusiastic step towards the "future" presented here: https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

msla 4y ago

Previously: > Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870 https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137/https://twitter.c... > This warning is prompted by a company called Brave, who've been taking cryptocurrency donations "for me", using my name and photo, without my consent. I asked them not to, and to refund anyone who's donated; they said "we'll see what we can do" and that "refunds are impossible". > I did ask Brave how keeping profiles on untold numbers of people and assigning donations to them without consent complied with GDPR, at which point the person talking to me stopped replying to emails.

TylerE 4y ago
Well, I mean, threatening legal action is going to result in silence from any even marginally competent company.
KyleBerezin 4y ago
This is old and no longer relevant. The new system is people can still donate to anyone, even people not registered as creators. The donated BAT sits around for a while so the person has time to register and receive the donations if they so choose. After so many days, if they do not accept, your BAT is automatically returned to you.

wkat4242 4y ago

I'm really surprised they are still pushing this BAT stuff. Who is willingly going to look at ads? At least make it possible to do it with money instead.

KyleBerezin 4y ago
I do, but you are not forced to look at ads, you can just turn it off. Also you can do it with money if you want.

AraceliHarker 4y ago

Brave is not so brave after all. It merely swaps other people’s ads for its own, like a thief in the night. A trick as old as AdBlock Plus.

princevegeta89 4y ago
Ublock Origin for the win. Block every shit that gets in the way.
mackatap 4y ago
I completely agree. It feels very dirty. You take away the source of income for the creators to earn an extra dollar for yourself.
- mherrmann 4y ago
  s/to earn an extra dollar for yourself/to fund your project, in a privacy-preserving way, to make the internet a better place/.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    How many impressions would you need to cover even a $20 monthly hosting bill, never mind feed yourself or pay rent?
    - valrix 4y ago
      Out of genuine curiosity, I decided to run a few numbers to really find out what it would take for ads alone to support a website and the single developer (no family, no debts, just rent, food, utilities, and hosting). Hosting: $20/month Rent: $800/month (single room studio, if lucky enough to find one) Food: $200/month (likely should be higher due to recent inflation) Utilities: $150/month Total: $1370/month Typical PPM (Price Per Mille) for ads: $6/1000 ads = $0.006 $1370/$0.006 = ~228,333 ad impressions per month. You could reduce the number of required visitors by shoving more ads into the page (3 or more), but even with 3 ad impressions per visit, you'd still need about 76,166 visits each month. That's over 7,600 visits every single day!

plaguepilled 4y ago

I like Brave's Defaults (har har) in a lot of places but I am firmly against their monetisation schemes. There is an attitude among a lot of people in the founder space that "subscription models are what everyone says they want - but no one actually pays up". This is demonstrably false. Plenty of content creators are making modest but sustainable incomes via Patreon, even despite the skew towards the top 2% of creators. I think what the phrasing should be is, "I could make a modest income via the subscription model, but a notably higher income via other methods. Because this is my primary means of evaluating an approach, I therefore consider the subscription model unviable, assuming maximal competition." That would at least be more defensible if one could justify their concern that their sector is high-competition.

MisterSandman 4y ago

I will never understand the hype behind Brave. Why would I watch ads that give Brave a cut of the money, instead of watching ads that actually benefit the content I'm looking at?

dbsmith83 4y ago
Or a browser which forces you to update whether you want to or not
shp0ngle 4y ago
Their ads are supposedly more privacy preserving, and also have some crypto mumbo jumbo involved
TylerE 4y ago
Because only one gets them VC money from crypto fomo.
Dalewyn 4y ago
[flagged]
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  That's not factual. Neither Firefox nor Safari are based on chromium. There are a lot of forks though, i.e. Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and Edge
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    I said 99%. Safari is artificially pegged to iOS marketshare, it would cease to remain relevant if/when Apple's gatekeeping is relinquished. FireChrome is irrelevant so long as Mozilla is in charge, and its forks are even further irrelevant. The rest of the browser world is Chrome through and through.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      Safari has 17% of the global browser market.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

EamonnMR 4y ago

Oh brave. Still fast on mobile but every day the cursed triangle of crypto in the corner nudges me a little further away.

jhasse 4y ago
You can disable it in the settings :)

PufPufPuf 4y ago

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Patreon give you the full value proposition of Brave while actually delivering on the promises. Stop promoting this scum.

KyleBerezin 4y ago
You seem to have a lot of hate for this browser, I'm interested to know why (for real, I am not being argumentative). I decided to give it a shot and I am enjoying it so far.