I think Brave's potentially most important (and least certain) contribution to the world is its automatic micro-payments system. It's genuinely innovative and the only viable alternative that anyone has proposed to ads-based funding for smaller sites. It's also, by nature, incredibly hard to bootstrap. But I really hope it gets real traction and ends up standardized and/or copied by other browsers.
IMO it misses the point. I don't want ads. Pay me for seeing ads may be better than just see ads but what I really want is no ads. For now I block them. This way I get to see nearly no ads. I can't get my head around why I would let some ads trough to earn some bucks. It totally missing the point.
What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue. The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be. Now we have ads and a third-party in between which severs itself plus another party the advertisers. Brave removes the third-party (kinda) but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why? No one needs them to be part of a goods/service <> money exchange.
There is an open W3C standard that can be used for micro-payments it's called ILP. Not bound to a currency. No token. No scaling problems because it tires to run everything "on the blockchain". It's just a protocol it can be used with any token or currency.And Payment providers must compete against each-other just like it should be in a healthy economy. (At time of writing there seem to be only one payment provider (Coil.com) but that's just because someone has to start.)
> we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive
So, just buy more BAT and you dont need to see ads. other people may not be able to afford paying, so they 'll prefer to see ads
> but leaves the advertiser in the game. Why?
The printing press, radio and TV always had ads, why? becuase it's the most natural fit, and it allows them to have more / better content. ad-supported content is not going away. A world with more options is always better
I don't read books with ads, I don't watch films with ads, I don't listen to music with ads. One-way broadcast technologies where one suckles at the teat of momma-Media-empire will come with ads because baby cannot help but drink what momma puts into her nutrition. The content model has changed, the internet is a two-way or multiplayer chat, not a one-way broadcast. Advertising has no place on the internet. Advertisements are not a stand-in for content. Human attention is not a commodity. These problems are solvable, but not with steam engines and model Ts. Why wedge a brand new frontier of technology between the rear view mirror of the obsolescence desert and a nearby Tuesday? Surely we can think of something more delightful than indirectly pointing to consumption via thinly veiled business-as-art. As one who adores the study of logo and design, it doesn't make sense to pay someone to make mediocre art to sell me something instead of just using that money to make good art in the first place. There.
Just so you know, there are plenty of books, films and music with ads. The harder you try to run away from ads, the more you pay to escape them, the harder they'll try to get you to see them and the more they'll pay for it.
That's why I think it's inevitable for Netflix to get ads. Even if it's not a pre-roll ad, it could be just tons of in-content advertisements. Like they do with a lot of movies. Such as Sony movies, plenty of Sony phones, laptop, TVs, speakers, etc.
The only way to get rid of ads from your life, is to become a billionaire that owns a personal city where you can outlaw them yourself. Otherwise, you're screwed.
Just so you know, there are plenty of books, films and music with ads
Yes, and also plenty without, so that doesn't prove much I'm afraid.
The harder you try to run away from ads, the more you pay to escape them, the harder they'll try to get you to see them and the more they'll pay for it.
Do you mean this literally, and if so can you give an example? Just asking because I've never experienced anything like this. Or I don't know what you mean.
people are free to create their own ad-free internet platform. that doesn't mean that they have a right to force this model on everyone. now excuse me, i have to walk my unicorn
I did not mean to be adversarial, I think you brought up some excellent points, and I thank you for the opportunity to organize thought on the matter. Your observation that radio will always have advertisements is unchallengeable, it's only inevitable that there will be a mix of approaches as we go forward.
By buying BAT I support people getting paid for watching ads.
Also and open door for ad-fraud. Bat browser doesn't know if a real user watches the ads. Do we really need more click farms and all that crap?
The solution to all this is so obvious; the third party must be removed from the equation.
Local "fee" (ad monetized) prints are horrible.
Never used Radio so I can't say anything about that. TV however has become more and more ad cluttered and low quality over the last decades to the point where I completely stopped watching any TV several years ago.
Ads may fit in newspapers and in TV programs. But when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap. Ads don't incentive good content. They incentive click-bait titles, fake news and an anything that maximizes the time an end user waists.
> when newspapers and TV programs are created for the sole purpose to serve ads it just results in crap
Do you think that they are created to enlighten and entertain you? The model is: get your attention, and mix some ads in with the content. User gets content, advertiser gets customers, publisher makes profit.
The $3 you pay for a newspaper barely covers distribution costs. And they have to be created from scratch and actually printed every day.
High frequency publishing and advertising have always co existed. And the internet is just the latest iteration of high frequency publication.
that's because in digital, google & FB are gobbling up the bulk of advertising budgets, leaving little money in display advertising to be shared by hundreds of media sites. it's not an inherent property of ads that they create clickbait, it's the need for increasingly more ad views.
The inherent property of ads is that a third-party is involved who strives for maximal profit at the cost of the other two parties. Even the nicest possible third-party can't make the deal better for the others.
If you buy BAT you will indirectly support the system Brave has created but you will directly support each and every website you choose to donate to.
As for "ad fraud" and "click farming", I think we can leave the work of determining real users to Brave. Can you point to any sort of evidence this is already occurring? I am genuinely asking because I did not know it was a problem for a browser company.
Does it show them to have better content though? Radio sucks these days as your get long as segments every 20 minutes. TV is just poison to your brain with constant ad bombarding. Press is dying and for good reason: it's basically low quality opinion pieces. Most journalists don't link to sources and can't stop themselves from inserting opinions presented as facts. I think Internet exposed even the most well established newspapers. You can get way better information by just looking for sources.
I watch my movies on Netflix, sports on paid streaming services with little to no ads. The only quality ad supported content I am able to find is on YouTube mainly interviews, podcasts and educational videos. Even then I am supposedly able to pay to not watch the ads (YouTube red wasn't available in my country last time I've checked).
Ads poison the content. People are willing to pay 50-100$ to watch a boxing night. I don't think it's impossible to make them pay for quality content.
Only a very small percentage of users are willing to pay for an online service, that's < 2% usually. It's also very difficult and costly to accept payments for small amounts and do the accounting, sales tax / VAT properly. Ads are comparatively much easier to setup.
TV programming is the USA was pretty much created when advertisers realized the potential of the medium yet understood that no one would watch ads non-stop, which is why the had talk shows, tv series, game shows, etc made. The first TV ad - for Bulova watches - dates back to 1941, just two years after the first TV sets were sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair.
> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.
The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.
While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).
>all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
Actually you pay for the ads. There are no companies who "can afford to pay for the ads". Everything they spend on ads is directly included in the price of the product. If you aren't a customer then another customer paid to show you ads. Ads are not for the user they are to maximize profit. It's a trade off for a company they can spend some of the revenue on ads to generate more revenue thus making less profit per item but more overall.
They target the optimum which means that several percent of revenue is put in ads. For everyone else this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads or more resource wasting because ads make people buy stuff they don't need.
> this has only negative effects like less competition because the large player dominate trough ads
Ads can also be good for competition: if your upstart product is better or cheaper ads can help you get the word out. Here's a paper that looks at the effect of advertising bans on eyeglasses, and sees that they led to higher prices: https://www.jefftk.com/benham2013.pdf
> What we really need is a way to pay for content so content creators can survive without ad revenue.
I think there's been some confusion (partly because of Brave's confusing marketing). I didn't even realize there was the pay-the-user-for-ads thing. I was only talking about the micro-payments from users to sites.
So turn off ads. The whole point of a market is that people who don't think whatever you're doing is worth the price you're getting don't have to do it, while those who think that it is worth it get the rewards. By turning off ads you're raising the market price of BAT ever so slightly so that those of us who don't mind the ads get paid more for it.
If you look at this from economic point of view, watching ads on its own does zero value creation. The People who get paid for it must (on average) spend way more than what they got on the advertise products else this is unsustainable.
That's not really true. Ads give people the opportunity to learn about products they wouldn't otherwise know about. If the new products are better, economic value is created. If they aren't, no transaction occurs and nobody is worse off, except for the attention spent on ads, which is what BAT is trying to price.
> The internet must transit to a market where people pay for goods and services just like on literally every other market. There is money and goods/serviced and they get exchanged. That's how it should be.
While I don't think simple flat payments for services and goods is wrong, it's worth noting that it's more regressive than ad-based services: the value of ad impressions is proportional to discretionary income, whereas a flat $10/month is proportionally more for a poor household than a rich one.
Like, try asking poor households whether they'd rather pay $5 or $10/month for various internet services vs seeing the ads they get now, and we both know which option most would choose, for very sensible reasons.
It's not though because it blocks ads and then pays publishers creators fuck all in comparison to what they would have made with ads. If you look at Brave's RPMs you'll find they are total dogshit.
The feature where you get paid to see ads is a side feature. It wasn't in the initial release, and it is opt-in. The main purpose of the BAT token is to be like Flattr or Cointip, but for the whole internet.
I don't mind ads but I don't want the tracking. Just throw up some generic ads based on the site. Sorry I want my privacy big corps or I'll continue to block everything.
It's "missing the point" because it doesn't fit your personal preferences precisely? There are plenty of people who don't care at all about ads, and there's a full spectrum of attitudes in between them and the hard no-ads position. Brave is targeting people within that spectrum.
No it's not the first or only attempt at this. Time (or other metric) based funding of content has been tried several times. We spent 6-figures on experimenting ourselves with a autopayments browser extension.
The hard problem is getting people to actually pay in the first place, not how to divide up the money after. Since Brave is basically a higher-level ad network with a free browser, it's paying the users first and then taking it from them in a secondary loop. It's a combination of nice marketing and forceful control over typical ad experience.
Yeah, lots of other groups have developed micropayment systems, but it looks like Brave might have finally figured out how to make it work on a large enough scale that it might improve the web.
I think that is partly because Brave has tied micropayments to something else people care about by putting their system in a privacy-oriented browser.
I didn't actually know about this mechanism. I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited. Adding another layer of ads on top is... interesting. But feels like it's just kicking the can down the road.
What I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to current paywalls but broken down into effortless micro-distributions the way Brave is. So a subset of sites would say "you can only browse our site if you're using a browser that will pay us and you're paying $10/month (total) which will be distributed amongst us based on what sites you visit and how often".
This would solve the main problem with paywalls, which is that literally nobody is willing to maintain dozens of separate subscriptions (both in terms of logistics and price) across all of the websites they read one article on each month. Apple News+ is trying a similar solution to this problem, but gated into their proprietary app. This could instead be a web standard that keeps people on the real web.
It had too few conversions and many of those were too small (< $5) to make it viable.
Ads are already effortless and fair, they generate cash from your attention in real-time and on-demand. The problem is the overall experience (interruptive formats, high frequency, tracking, etc) which is what Brave is really improving on. Good luck to them.
> I thought users had to pay a monthly amount if they wanted to support the sites they visited.
Exactly, this is how it should be. Skipping ads/ad-revenue not glorify them by paying user to click it away.
Please have a look at Coil.com it's exactly what they do.
The problem with subscription models are that they are walled-gardens. You can only flattr to people who use flattr. That can not scale. An it would be terrible if it does. The web monetization can not be in the hand of a single company like flatter. Coil however is just one payment provider that use the interledger protocol. If the content creator uses another payment provider who also uses the open interledger protocol donation form someone using coil still would be delivered. Coil doesn't care what provider the other party uses. It just reads the Web Monetization Meta Tag and sends the donation to the given address. Anyone on the web who has a banking relationship with user could potentially be a web monetization payment provider. For example Netflix. As a content creator this changes nothing. You still have one Web Monetization Meta Tag in your page with the address where to send the donations you don't have to care if some donation come from Coil user and some from Netflix users.
>Also, what mechanism does coil have to prevent a “content creator” from bombarding the end user with ads?
Nothing. Coil is a payment provider for web monetization. It's up to the content creator to provide content in way people want to consume it. A content creator can of course still show ads to user who donate and piss off the user.
And the user can of course still block ads or turn off donation for that site (or both). Donation hardly depend on the time you spend on a site. So if you go to a site and its overloaded with ads you simply leave. (The fact that people know that sites get donations if they stay on the site probably has a very positive effect on people behavior)
- View ads on site and generate cash for site via attention in real-time.
- View ads from Brave and earn BAT, pay BAT to site as user.
It's a mix between the two models. You're still working via your attention to generate value and trade it for content from the site, it's just inserting 1 more step from the usual ads but with more control over the experience since it's handled by Brave.
What examples do you have? So far I can think of Steem coin and Dogecoin. The former has the vendor lock-in issue, and the latter has no standardized automation of tipping.
Flattr was probably the most famous. It's still running, last I checked anyway. Readability.com tried something like that as well - remove ads from a site and pay the site owner directly instead. Site owners got very angry about this and it stopped that pretty quickly.
I admit that I would hate to see Flattr become a monopolistic payment platform that knows everything abou the websites you visit... but which also seemed inevitable as they have to determine how much to pay to whom ?
The biggest thing is you don't have to contribute actual money. Instead of watching the website's intrusive, tracker-ridden ads, you're receiving custom ones from Brave tailored to you based on a local machine learning profile. You're watching ads on your own, separate from the ad networks used by the websites, and so you get a virtual token that can be sent to creators you like. They can convert it to actual cash (you can too if you want).
The whole point is no money is invoked for the browser user unless they want to go to the frog me of withdrawing the bat they earned. Instead they can just assign it to someone they support
That's what's superior. Real money services require someone to pay real money.
This system could be done without the coin but I bet it would be more difficult to arrange transfer to each browser user.
As with all of these systems, where it's likely to fall down is that the monetary amount you receive for viewing ads will be so miniscule as to be inconsequential.
if this kind of model works, the biggest contribution will be security. potentially , cross-site scripting could be disabled altogether if it is no longer needed to fund the web
