[–]BrendanEichBrave 118 points 14 days ago*
Hi, some quick replies while I'm here:
We don't use ad exchanges (malware on demand side, fraud on supply, tracking cookies/pixels/scripts required and we block those). The BAT ads idea is quite different: personal user-private/anonymous ads in a pinned tab, local machine learning picks best offer from catalog of URLs w/ segment ids and other metadata so no cookies or tracking. Confirmation via the same ZKP protocol (ANONIZE2) we use for payments already. User gets 70% revenue share (App Store standard), which by default pays back to top/pinned creators for that user, as opting into BAT ads opts into Brave Payments. We hope to have trials running 1Q2018. (Note how this avoids bad ads against good content and vice versa. The third party ad problem is full of conflicts and we want to try a new approach. If publishers want to partner with us as third-party vendor for otherwise-blocked inventory, then we may do that too with user as well as pub consent. Revenue then splits 70% to pub, 15% to user. This is over the horizon for us but we did some early experiments in 2016 and could stand it up next year if pubs want it.)
See (1), I got ahead of myself. BAT user-private ads pay 70% to user, deals start with trials (we are talking to top brands and agencies) next year first half. In-page ads possible but not urgent, those pay 70% to pub and 15% to user. Brave's principles are opt-in (consent from user and any publisher whose inventory would be filled), rev-share to user >= our take, stable fees auditable in-the-large on blockchain.
Brave won't corner the market overnight, so as we grow we will work to standardize what we can with other browser vendors. For some strange reason, Apple is our best ally among big 4. ;-) In mean time, our early adopters are lead users who tend to give back. We do not expect most to cash out their revshare as it won't be a huge amount per month (but who knows? Fair-market price for attention has yet to be discovered) and the KYC hassle to get control of tokens is not worth it to users who'd rather trickle it back to top/browsed/pinned sites and accounts which is the default flow when you opt into BAT ads which enables Brave Payments. (Thus we put the user, with local machine learning and automation (all open source), in place of the third parties of the Lumascape, for connecting revenue from advertisers (+ users out of their own good will) to creators.)
You can give BATs to the big platforms but we use a global/objective semantic classifier to disable auto-inclusion of the big platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. As I said to a journo recently, those outfits are among the richest companies in the world (well, maybe not Twitter
), and they've exploited their creators. We have on the roadmap a control to let users dial in the platform landlord vs. tenant split, but we're not rushing to add that.
The simplest thing to do is promote Brave to your supporters who are willing to contribute in lieu of revenue from the ads that they block. They can pin a percentage of their monthly BAT budget to your account. We will soon be releasing grants from the BAT User Growth Pool (UGP) to users as incentive to adopt and fund their wallets. We are thinking about matching contributions for first N months from the UGP too.
If you are worried about free riders using Brave and not contributing, I'd like to hear more. We see users already blocking via uBO + Chrome or Brave, so net-net don't expect a sharp uptick from unblocked-Chrome to Brave conversion -- but if this is a problem, we have ideas for how to solve it. Happy to say more.
