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Ad-Blocking Brave Browser Will Offer Free Cryptocurrency to All Users

posted by chromas on Monday April 23 2018, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the webscale-blockchain dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Brave browser's basic attention token (BAT) technology is designed to let advertisers pay publishers. Brave users also will get a cut if they sign up to see ads.

Brave developed the basic attention token (BAT) as an alternative to regular money for the payments that flow from advertiser to website publishers. Brave plans to use BAT more broadly, though, for example also sending a portion of advertising revenue to you if you're using Brave and letting you spend BAT for premium content like news articles that otherwise would be behind a subscription paywall.

Most of that is in the future, though. Today, Brave can send BAT to website publishers, YouTubers and Twitch videogame streamers, all of whom can convert that BAT into ordinary money once they're verified. You can buy BAT on your own, but Brave has given away millions of dollars' worth through a few promotions. The next phase of the plan, though, is just to automatically lavish BAT on anyone using Brave, so you won't have to fret that you missed a promotional giveaway.

"We're getting to the point where we're giving users BAT all the time. We don't think we'll run out. We think users should get it," CEO and former Firefox leader Brendan Eich said. "We're going to do it continually."

The BAT giveaway plan is an important new phase in Brave's effort to salvage what's good about advertising on the internet -- free access to useful or entertaining services like Facebook, Google search and YouTube -- without downsides like privacy invasion and the sorts of political manipulations that Facebook partner Cambridge Analytica tried to enable.

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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 23 2018, @08:42PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:42PM (#670878)

    ... the publisher collects 70 percent of the ad revenue, but you get 15 percent.

    Brave takes the other 15%. So how much is 15% of looking at some ads? It might be interesting to know just how much you as a user will get for allowing them to get to your eyeballs.

    ... the browser itself will use machine learning technology to target ads to Brave users without sharing personal information with advertisers, publishers or Brave itself

    Suuure. Isn't it kind of pointless if you buy ads if you can't figure out if someone watched them and if that then translated into purchases (ie Tracking of some kind). Otherwise we are back to marketing pseudoscience of estimating brand values and things like that. Not that that ever stopped.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:47PM (#670880)

    Who cares? Any ad system that becomes op-in or non-tracking is fine by me :D

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @08:54PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:54PM (#670882)

    So how much is 15% of looking at some ads?

    https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#/?modal_active=none [google.com]

    Not much, I have had a website with Google Adsense on it forever, I'm up to $94 earned so far. $7.12 for 15 clicks on 5266 page views just in the last 2 years.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]