Any idea that starts with "and first, we get the user to switch their browser" has immediately raised their own barrier to entry so ridiculously high, were you to stand on top of it you'd be able to see the curvature of the Earth. What a stupid thing to do.
They also list that 600 million devices are actively blocking ads, meaning these people went out of their way to not see ads. Now you want them to switch browser just so that they can see ads - are they on crack?
This. One hundred times this. I block ads, and I certainly wouldn't switch from Firefox to some random unknown browser for the privilege of seeing ads.
Having said that however, if there was an option in Firefox to enable this, I may consider it if all other ads were still blocked.
I think the idea is that if advertising on the web respected users, they wouldn't feel the need to block ads. This is their attempt to make advertising work in a way that helps everyone.
What's the alternative? If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
> I think the idea is that if advertising on the web respected users, they wouldn't feel the need to block ads.
True and more than this, advertising could be a service to me.
Advertising has multiple functions. One is helping with discovery. Users have some problem they don't know someone is solving. Another is branding. Shove brand recognition down people's throats until they automatically reach for your product.
I use friends to discover new products and services, because they provide reliable suggestions and don't water down their reputation through brand building.
I was excited for the targeted ads movement, because of what it promised. I really want a recommendation engine that is smarter than everyone I know. That would be amazing. It's a giant world with lots of startups and makers, surely my monkey brain cannot possibly know enough people to track every one of these. So I'm ready, have the grand AI tell me what people are making and how it helps my life!
In practice, they didn't deliver. Targeted ads are like an idiot savant. I basically just get recommendations to buy whatever I just bought, even if that makes no sense. (You just bought a blender, why don't you buy two of them so you can have one on every counter!?)
It's the simplest logic that would work on a plurality of sales. Most people who buy paper towels later buy them again. Ok, new rule: people like buying what they just bought. No exceptions, logic done.
I know incredibly smart people work on targeted ads, so I can't imagine they're missing this. My best guess is that there's too much low hanging fruit to improve a recommendation engine, or that the other lucrative aspects of advertising (brand building) chase out any funding or development for a 100% user-interest focused ad-engine, er, recommendation-engine for products.
So I actually respect the impossible bar that BAT sets for itself. If we have an advertising system people will actually install a browser for (or pay a monthly subscription for), then we will have fixed advertising. Not before.
It's a good finish line. Whoever can cross it definitely wins.
I think the idea is that if advertising on the web respected users, they wouldn't feel the need to block ads.
The users have heard that too often. We're all out of trust to give.
If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
If every web user blocked all ads, content creators wouldn't be able to get any revenue from ads. There are other ways of getting revenue.
What's the alternative?
There's what @libeclipse said in his comment: if you somehow make this tech work in popular browsers, then there are people who might be willing to try it and maybe it becomes the accepted solution.
Other than that? Paid content. Yes, that makes it harder for content creators to get money and harder for content consumers to get free content. So what?
Are we really so convinced that everyone who creates anything deserves to be paid for it? Do we really need so much free content? More specifically, are we all so convinced of these two things that we're okay with giving up our rights on how to render web content on our own computers? 'Cause that's what it boils down to in the end.
I just think it's silly to completely throw out the idea of ad-based revenue because currently the ad culture sucks. More paid content? Ok, sure. But what if we could also have ads that didn't suck? I think it's a worthy goal.
Why? I really don't understand why people think that ads of all things need saving.
I understand the desire to make money flow towards the content creators. I understand the desire for free content. I understand that the ads seem to "solve" both of those problems. I just don't understand why people think it's better to keep investing our time and energy into trying to save ads instead of looking for alternative solutions.
The nature of ads is to be hostile and misleading to the people viewing them. Their purpose is to drive demand where none previously existed, they are at odds with the user.
That's a simplistic viewpoint. If ads weren't useful at all, no one would click on them, or, if they did, they wouldn't buy whatever was at the other end.
There is such a thing as artificially inflated demand, which can be a problem, but I don't think it's likely that all advertising falls in that bucket.
> I think the idea is that if advertising on the web respected users, they wouldn't feel the need to block ads.
It's a great idea! I completely agree. If advertising on the web respected users and users could trust that they would be respected, users wouldn't feel the need to block ads.
With that said, it's possible that perhaps users have trusted this precise pitch in the past. In general, money has proven corrosive to respect, and ad-blockers stage a comeback as a result.
> What's the alternative? If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
Make something good enough that I want to pay for it. This isn't ridiculous or a pipe dream. I pay for The Economist and Nautilus because they are worth it to me.
It's a little difficult because there are a lot of publications that I'd like to read a few articles from, but not enough to warrant a subscription. Micro-payments seems like an interesting solution to this, but I haven't seen it fully worked out. Right now, advertising serves this niche.
I don't really see the need to trust advertisers in Brave's scheme here, either. You need to trust the browser to judge which ads are acceptable, but alternatively you need to trust the ad blocker to know which things are ads.
Some would stop, some would not. Some would just not do so as their day job. Some would find other ways to get revenue, etc. The "starving artist" trope is plenty real. Low revenue has not stopped them.
Whenever someone argues that less content will be produced, I always feel that it just won't be enough reduction for consumers to care. Things like Youtube grew in a climate where being a full-time Youtuber was not possible like it is today.
The internet was pretty nice in the era of hobbyist websites that were linked by webrings. You don't have to make money to create content. Maybe it would reduce all the clickbait if there were no money to be made.
What's the alternative? If every web user blocked all ads, content creators couldn't get any revenue and would stop making content.
I understand the problem. I just think that this is a stupid solution. As for content creators getting revenue, how about selling it? Like we used to do?
Yeah, I agree I don't really see this BAT stuff as the solution, but I do appreciate people trying to find novel solutions.
Straight up selling content isn't the solution either, IMO. It would require a huge cultural shift in what the web is, which I don't think people are willing to do. More problematically, if all web content was a la carte paid for, that would lock out lower income people from a ton of information, which seems like a step backward, socially.
Something a lot of these comments are currently missing is the fact that the video specifically described that:
1. The brave browser by default blocks ads and tracking software.
2. That advertisements are opt-in only in the brave browser.
So while this is a subtle advertisement for the Brave Browser[0], I think this is also a clean separation from the browser in attempt to create a new form of advertising. While obviously those defaults can change, I'd imagine the reason for the clean separation between the BAT and the Brave Browser is because users would be significantly more hesitant to join if the "goal" of the browser was an alternative for of advertising. On that merit I would evaluate the browser separately from this idea.
Ignoring the integration with the Brave browser though, one issue for this is that this doesn't solve the fundamental problem of a company that might have a boring product, that wants to advertise and is willing to pay for it. Google will take your money, and show your ads to the relevant market. People click on those ads, and drive engagement to the company. Most companies don't have exciting enough products to be able to drive engagement with simply the "product".
Another issue is that if the BAT tokens are generated from users attention and the quality of the ads, and NO user information is stored like is claimed here, then there would engagement would most likely be significantly less than with other advertisers, as the advertising market is then expanded to all people, rather than the demographic the company is trying to hit. This would mean that whatever monetization form Brave comes up with is going to have to be a lot cheaper than what Google is charging, because I can almost guarantee engagement suffer drastically.
Finally, as a quick test, I don't even see the browser succeeding on the basis of blocking "all" ad content, as it doesn't even block Facebook ads with the "block all ads" setting checked[1]. I'd imagine because Facebook sends their ads along with the actual page content, which I'd also imagine most other ad companies would figure out a way to do if Brave becomes more successful.
> User: yes, but why don't I just run an ad-blocker and wait for the tragedy of the commons to befall content publishers?
The problem with this is that it doesn't influence incentives in the right way. If your goal is to replace advertising entirely, there needs to be something to replace it. If your goal is to make advertising better, you need to reward the "good ads" (whatever that means) by selectively showing them.
If you just don't care and don't want to see ads, I guess you're in the majority but you're not really helping anything.
I'm just thinking from the point of view of each of these actors. Users do not care about content publisher finances until their favorite site goes under. What they do appear to care about - day by day - is whether they see advertising or not.
For everyone involved in the ecosystem, Brandon Eich and Brave are starting out on the wrong foot.
This looks like too much effort. Here is a far simpler idea: just hypnotize people via ads so they willingly disable ad blockers, click on every ad they see and ultimately buy so much stuff they go broke.
This really doesn't make sense. With Bitcoin, I know there are lots of people who will accept them in exchange for real goods and services. With "BAT" Tokens, I don't know why anyone would want them.
He mentions that tracking and adblocking are wasteful, but I view them as a beautiful example of how the market implicitly equilibrates itself to provide the "right amount" of advertising.
I like Brave, but it seems to me that they are over-engineering a non-problem.
So users need to use their "Brave" browser? What do they gain from this, apart from earning "BAT"s that seems to only allow access to premium features on that browser?
Also, what happens to actual real ads? Are they blocked and replaces by their own ads by the browser?
What I understood: the ad-matching algorithms and click-stream tracking takes place only on the client side. And since it's open source you could theoretically verify that none of this data is leaking.
>Also, what happens to actual real ads? Are they blocked and replaces by their own ads by the browser?
Not sure. Ideally, the content provider is on-board with the scheme and will be compensated by "tokens" (which have monetary value) based on Ethereum.
It's all actually quite clever, but faces obvious "chicken-and-egg" problems.
Yeah. This seems a bit nonsense. The browser "blocks trackers"... while also tracking you. Smells like bullshit to me. As far as I can tell the main selling point is it's using the current buzzword that makes everyone get all hot and bothered: "blockchain"
Tracking is important for delivering "relevant" ads, which many people would prefer. The real issue is that the different ad networks spew their trackers across the web, without respect for users' privacy or user experience.
I don't really think Brave's solution here is fully-baked, but the idea of replacing all those third-party trackers with one that's on-device and (presumably) I can have some degree of control over sounds like a step in the right direction.
I don't see what's wrong with this. Ads suck, but people need to make money for the content they produce. I don't see anyone complaining about ads in physical newspapers or magazines (even though they can be pretty substantial) – the difference is that ads on the web track you, slow down your pages, and can be insecure.
The real solution is to find a reasonable compromise that balances everyone's interest, and that's what Brave is trying to do.
Perhaps you might consider switching if that is the only way that you can get control over the information about you that leaks out on many pages that you visit, words on pages that your mouse hovers over, words that you type in, friends you make, and so on.
Do you think that it might be impossible to get control over all of that information?
Or you could run firefox with ublock and privacybadger. Ads and tracking are blocked as well or better than with Brave, and as a bonus, I don't see advertisements.
It hurts advertisers, but not as much as by blocking them. It's a compromise where you can support the owner of the site you're visiting without having to pay money, and without dealing with invasive ad trackers.
I see no value added by using "blockchain" buzzword for a centralized system like this. It isn't even privacy protecting.
This is an obvious use case for 1) some kind of database/book entry system, centralized, if you don't care about anonymity or 2) blinded Chaumian tokens, if you want anonymity (which has security/risk model costs)
Can there ever be a mechanism that prevents people from reverse engineering the protocol to announce to the network that they're viewing ads, so that they can earn BATs for doing nothing? Their incentive would be to use these BATs to pay for premium content. This would undermine the value of BATs and damage the ecosystem.
The protocol would likely not allow BATs to be earned in browsers not properly implementing the protocol (measuring attention on a web page while protecting privacy, etc). And then instances of Brave and any other browser implementing this protocol could easily be cryptographically confirmed to the ad network.
An interesting idea but I find it hard to see this taking off and becomming the norm. They need to sell it to Google or something so they don't have to rely on the browser.
Also, rewarding users with "premium content" or let them "donate it to publsihers" doesn't seem too realistic.
I like the idea but I see some major hurdles before this takes off.
So publishers will receive BATs instead of $$? Can BATs be sold for money?
The website only says "BATs can be used for premium content or services on the Brave platform.".
It seems that the under this system advertisers have to buy BATs in order to show ads. Sorta makes sense. Sites get BATs for getting views, users get BATs for viewing ads, and advertisers need BATs connect to users.
They also list that 600 million devices are actively blocking ads, meaning these people went out of their way to not see ads. Now you want them to switch browser just so that they can see ads - are they on crack?
BAT? BATshit crazy...
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