Ok, now compare this behavior with all other advertising schemes, where only the marketers profit.

Edit: ok, I’ll elaborate so people don’t automatically assume I am some shill. I use brave as another browser but not my primary browser (firefox), have a wallet account with a few pennies worth of BAT. I have also been involved in the marketing industry for a while when I was younger, as a tech support person and as someone working to build an ad blocker of sorts.

Bottom line is marketing on the internet is awful. The default is programmatic ads, each of which loads its own slew of trackers when they win the bid for your eyeballs. Oh yeah, each programmatic ad view is a bidding war for brands and advertisers to try to show an ad at a specific slot on the page for you, the viewer the trackers already know lots about. Brands pay, marketers take a profit, sites hosting the ads take a small profit, more of your data (e.g., the site you visited and what was on that site) gets added to more trackers, which increases the value of your data, allowing trackers to earn more money from selling your data to more programmatic platforms… and while you site and read CreatorXYZ’s blog for hours, they get nothing. CreatorXYZ was never involved, why would they get money?

Google had a nicer idea… let’s just show small, targeted ads to help pay for gmail. Nicer because at least to begin with you are only dealing with google, not directly with platforms that can sell your data. Google has your data (all email providers do) and scans your data to give you ads. That’s creepy but did you read the part about programmatic? What’s worse here, one company using data to push more and text-only ads to you, not sharing your data with third parties without your knowledge, or a free for all where any advertiser can plug into any tracking platform which already has your data from visiting other websites, that then sells your data and continues to track you on the greater internet? But with the case with Google ads, CreatorXYZ’s wallet doesn’t increase because you happen to be on CreatorXYZ’s site. Brands spend money, google profits off charging for views of ads and clicks, but presumably only that, since other trackers aren’t involved with gmail.

Now let’s look at Brave. Brave ads are optional, and something you opt into. So, by default, no ads served, no harm done.

Let’s say you want to opt into Brave ads, and you do so. You see some notifications (yes, like system or browser notifications) pop up for ads. You can control how often you see these ads. Brave (as a browser) already knows a lot about you at the local level and could use this info to show you ads without even sharing that information with themselves (as would be the case for web based browsers). You get a small amount of BAT for seeing the ads. Fractions of a penny. You see some ads which spark your interest and so you click. You spend some time on the advertisers site, you earn a little more BAT. The advertiser may not even be aware who you are (as brave has a built in ad blocker so this would have to get around that), the browser sends the ad so there aren’t any trackers or even html or javascript used. Ads are just text based. Advertisers pay, brave gets a profit, no other companies get your information, including the advertisers. Now here’s the weird thing, because BAT is pretty useless as a form of currency (you aren’t going to be able to mine it really, and it has very little value), you may just decide to automatically share your BAT with creators. You enable this feature and go back to read more of CreatorXYZ’s blog. You spend a few hours on that blog and a small fraction of your BAT is held in a wallet, earmarked for the creator. The internet is big and not everyone has a direct deposit number on their site, so this escrow system was created to hold value until creators claim their wallet. This is your money (BAT) which you earned for just doing internet stuff and not minding ads. You can keep it, you can exchange it for USD and you can buy a pack of gum with it someday. But, because you and hundreds or maybe even thousands of readers to CreatorXYZ’s blog have enabled this sharing, there is something like $25 in the CreatorXYZ’s BAT wallet. Hopefully with this number of brave users, one of them will message CreatorXYZ, or CreatorXYZ will read about this program. CreatorXYZ signs up, gets $25 for free.

Literally I do not understand the concern with Brave ads. More advertising needs to go this way. I don’t like being a product.