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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Reuters has reported that, in a defeat for the publisher Springer, the German Supreme Court has ruled that ad blockers are legal.
Germany's Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a case brought by Axel Springer seeking to ban a popular application that blocks online advertising, in a landmark ruling that deals a blow to the publishing industry.
The court found in favor of Adblock Plus adblockplus.org, an app marketed by a firm called Eyeo that has been downloaded more than 100 million times by users around the world seeking protection from unwanted or intrusive online advertising.
That is followed by some analysis by Rick Falkvinge on the court's decision over at the Private Internet Access blog.
Related on SN:
Ad-Blocking Brave Browser Will Offer Free Cryptocurrency to All Users
Malvertising Campaign Finds a Way Around Ad Blockers
Ransomware Spreads Through Advertising on Major Sites
and many more ...
The Brave Browser by former Mozilla CEO and JavaScript developer Brendan Eich has begun testing opt-in ads and integrating Tor into private tabs.
From gHacks:
One of the key ideas behind Brave was to replace the current advertisement system of the Internet with a better one. Brave wanted to establish its own system that shares the advertisement revenue between publishers, users, and the company.
Brave uses its own currency and platform for that. BAT, Basic Attention Tokens, has been integrated into Brave Payments last year and some users started to use it to distribute BAT to publishers and creators anonymously. Brave funds this currently if you opt-in; this means that you do get a monthly budget of 15 BAT (about 4.41 USD) that you can distribute to websites you visit.
[...] The company announced the start of opt-in advertisement trials yesterday. Users need to leave a comment on the Brave forum and may be selected for the trial when they do.
Brave wants to do things differently in regards to advertisement and the two core difference to the existing advertising model are the following ones:
- Brave pays users about 70% of the gross advertising revenue in BAT. Users can use BAT to reward sites they visit or exchange it for other currency in the future.
- Brave's advertising model values user privacy. Instead of tracking users, it is downloading a set of ads to the user system based on region and language, and displays the most appropriate ad using local matching.
The advertisement option will be opt-in and consent-based according to Brave. Users who don't want to see advertisement don't need to change anything as ads won't be displayed to them.
From PC Gamer:
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:29PM (2 children)
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/634/economics/the-problem-with-printing-money/ [economicshelp.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @04:08AM (1 child)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation [wikipedia.org]
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography [wikipedia.org] aka yellow dots
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 24 2018, @10:00AM
I don't think you have to print this one. I think it's pure cyber, like BitCoin. If you have to print it, not great. Because you need computer and printer. You don't need computer. But, very hard to print from a phone, believe me!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @08:42PM (2 children)
Ever see what happens when the holders of valuable tokens all try to cash out at once?
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/ [coinmarketcap.com]
They've got a market cap of $429M on their 1M circulating BAT, and an impressive volume of $8M per day, but only because they're giving lots of it away.
When BAT holders turn around and (try to) cash out, do you think they'll be able to extract even $10M before that value collapses completely?
Kudos to them for trying to find reasons for people to want to buy BAT... I hope it works out for them.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @11:13PM (1 child)
You have no clue how investments work. Investments mostly work on the power of psychological influence. If it was on actual innate value, stocks would crash too.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday April 24 2018, @03:09AM
No: stock shares have intrinsic value because they give you an ownership interest in the company's assets and profits. The intrinsic value of a stock share is the time-discounted value of all profit and asset distributions the owner will ever be entitled to on account of owning the share.
The stock market isn't entirely rational -- far from it -- but, for the cases where it is, you can see how it's supposed to work by comparing the value of a stock just before its ex-dividend date and just after: the price will typically go down by the value of the upcoming dividend.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday April 23 2018, @08:42PM (2 children)
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.
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:47PM
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
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]
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday April 23 2018, @09:10PM (1 child)
One of my extensions feeds google queries every so often to muddy google's idea of what I'm interested in. Methinks I could come up with an extension that went to select web pages every so often, collected my eyeball tax, and tossed everything else into /dev/null.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:14AM
Just add the proper user agent or cookies or whatever to wget -p -O /dev/null https://wherever.example/ [wherever.example] https://somewhere.else.invalid/ [somewhere.else.invalid]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @09:21PM (2 children)
I'll run the browser, look at 100,000 ads, and gather enough pennies to buy a bar of soap from Amazon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
I've got 24.25 tons of class C flyash I am looking to unload in one batch. How many BAT would you offer for that?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @11:09PM
I've got 112,000 miles of string*. Any offers?
*Which, due to bad planning, is in three inch lengths.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:13PM (2 children)
I'm glad to see nobody is falling for this botnet browser, with pajeet tier cryptocoin ponzi tacked on.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @10:28PM (1 child)
"Our brand is overpriced, and a portion of each purchase goes to harass innocent web users."
Hey, thanks for letting me know, I'll try to avoid that brand in the future!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @11:38PM
It's opt-in.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Monday April 23 2018, @10:49PM (1 child)
You can't have an Ad-blocking browser that also serves ads. It's an adware version of anti-ad technology, which just another way to say that it's a militarized browser designed to protect a single advertising platform, while strategically denying all opponents the ability to operate in the same market.
What we need is a browser that will reliably funnel micropayments in a 100% anonymous fashion (designed for anonymity from the start) to the publishers. I wouldn't mind purchasing 100$ worth of this new cryptocurrency, if it was parceled out by my browser and then delivered to the web publishers I enjoy.
Brave is one man's attempt to completely corner and control all Internet advertising for himself, not an attempt to bring safety, security, and ad-free browsing to the people.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:55AM
Google wants that, Facebook wants that. If they merge, maybe, probably, they'll get it. It's called a monopoly, everybody wants it. Somebody will get it. Maybe Brendan will get it, he's a smart guy. I just want it to go to AMERICANS. So we can keep the jobs in our Country!
(Score: 2) by leftover on Monday April 23 2018, @11:31PM (2 children)
The entire little bubble-world of ad revenue and absurd valuations seems unable to grasp a single fact: attention (to an ad) value is generated only by people who might be interested in buying what the ad is pitching. Any accounting for attention value coming from anywhere else is a fraud. Everyone else in the ad chain is a middleman or service provider or simply a parasite. Ad-supported content is wishful thinking. When that became evident the response was to go even deeper into the rabbit hole, taking us to our current Orwellian state of surveillance. (Such as the Alexa-presence robot - Yikes!)
Brave's formula to slosh BAT value around in the ad chain is interesting but not appealing to me. If they really want to upend the ad industry, pay consumers for certificates pledging their specific interest in a category of product for a certain time frame and in their location. Maybe even hold their BATs in escrow until they have made a purchase or at least looked at some number of suitable ads. When the purchase is made (or terminated) the certificate ends, along with all its permissions to show ads. Open-ended certificates should generate a stream of BATs to the consumer, perhaps with amounts based on the number of ads they agree to allow per time period.
Consumers get control over their ad exposure plus a revenue stream. Vendors get qualified leads and excellent tracking information for their ad expenses. Whoever runs the system gets to sell the highest value ads in the market.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:49AM (1 child)
At lunchtime today, I took a car to a local chain auto parts store because the "Check Engine" light is on. The store provides the free service of connecting their OBDII computer and telling you what code(s) are indicated by the light.
They don't know me. I didn't buy anything. It wasn't even my car; I was taking the car on behalf of someone else.
When I got home, I had an email from a different chain auto parts store (where I have bought things in the past) with the subject line: "[First-Name], check engine light on?" and offering *their* similar free service.
Maybe it's a total coincidence. But I was pretty creeped out. It was not a "happy promotional experience." Seemed more like stalking.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:40AM
EMAIL was a big problem for Crooked Hillary. She lost very badly because of it. And when we lock her up it'll become a bigger problem for her. And it's a problem for me. Folks ask for my EMAIL address, I tell them "no." I tell them I don't do EMAIL. But it comes anyway. So much comes! Big waste of my secretary's time.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:37AM (1 child)
If you are downloading software from someone, AND that someone says they are going to give you "free cryptocurrency," then I would recommend a healthy dose of skepticism.
Sure, maybe it's a world of advertisers paying you, but it's also possible you're mining cryptocurrency for them. Especially if you download their prebuilt executable* and they are giving you "free money."
-----
* Though Brave includes GPL2, GPL3, and MPL software, "The executable code version of the Brave browser is made available under the terms set forth below.... Brave and its licensors shall retain all intellectual property rights in the Brave browser", https://www.brave.com/terms-of-use/ [brave.com] -- under the "License" section, emphasis added.
Also, "As a condition of use, you promise not to use the Service for any purpose that is prohibited by the Terms of Use." including a prohibition on "violating any law", meaning that if you live in a country that oppresses its citizens, you can't use Brave except in unjust support of that country's evil laws. Otherwise, "the above license and your right to use the Brave browser will terminate immediately and without notice. Upon termination, you must destroy all copies of the Brave browser."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:57AM
All copies? Even ones not on your systems? This reminds me of the time my friend Jackson was playing with some small children. They wanted him to show them how to crack their knuckles, but they worded their question wrong and, being the selfless, caring, and generous fellow he was, he obliged their mistaken request by snapping their necks. Afterwards he cleaned up by moving their soulless corpses into the dumpster along with the deceased toys he was previously showing them how to play with.