During the last two weeks BAT for the first time in a long time showed high social activity. Brave rolled out Brave Ads, its digital advertising model, to desktop users in Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. Brave users can now earn its cryptocurrency Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) for viewing the browser’s built-in ads. Brave Ads let brands highlight offers, promote content, and engage users while reducing the chance of fraud associated with middlemen in digital advertising. These ads will give publishers and content creators 70% of the revenue share, with 15% going to users and the remaining 15% going to Brave. To continue, AMA with Des, Jan, and Brad took place. Brave plans to release a BAT SDK (software development kit) that will allow BAT to live outside the Brave eco-system. Plus the browser and token $BAT should be on all devices by the summer if there are enough users in a particular country. BAT community is growing. The project gains ground. Further updates to follow!
Development
Users of Brave’s latest release of the desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux can choose to view privacy-preserving Brave Ads by opting into Brave Rewards. These users will receive 70% of the ad revenue share as a reward for their attention, which they can auto-contribute to publishers under default settings. Brave’s platform is a new path toward a better Internet, where users can browse the web, earn rewards, and support their favorite content creators while preserving their privacy.
Brave Ads also provides brands with direct opportunities to highlight offers and engage with users as they browse the web. Since Brave Ads are opt-in, brands know with certainty that when their campaigns run with Brave, their ads are viewed by people who welcome advertising. Brave’s anonymous-but-accountable campaigns ensure that advertisers are connecting with the users they are seeking, removing the excessive costs, privacy, security, and fraud risks currently associated with middlemen in digital advertising.
*Brave Ads are now available on desktop in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K.
Brave Rewards is now available in the latest version of Brave for Android (1.0.91). To download it on your device, please visit the Google Play Store.
Brave Rewards is the new way to help fund content on the Web while blocking invasive ads and trackers:
- Users who wish to participate simply activate Brave Rewards by clicking on the BAT logo in the URL bar
- The Brave Rewards wallet uses Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), which can currently be freely received from occasional Brave user grants, and will later be granted via Brave Ads
- Users can reward their favorite content creators (publishers, YouTube channels, and soon Twitch streamers) with BAT; there are currently nearly 50,000 verified creators in the Brave Publisher program, ready to have BAT donations from Brave Rewards deposited into their Uphold accounts
- Users choose the monthly amount that works for them, and can even reward favorite creators with single tips
- Donations are automatically distributed based on how much time is spent on each site, and are always anonymous so that users can’t be identified based on the sites they visit
- As always, Brave browsing history is kept private
- Soon, Brave Rewards will feature Brave Ads, and users who opt into viewing those ads will receive BAT for their attention, which they can in turn distribute to creators or later exchange for real-world rewards
Brave will be allocating 100,000 BAT grants (each grant is the BAT equivalent of approximately $5) to its Android users. Grants can be received by clicking on the “accept” button in Brave Rewards.
Social encounters
In Italy, brave ads will be immediately visible? How will you spread the browser and token $BAT in Italy and Europe?
We roll out Brave ads in the following countries first: Canda, USA, UK, France, Germany, and Japan. Brave ads will be available on desktop first, then Android and then iOS. Should be on all devices by the summer. Italy should be in the next phase of Brave ads rollout. Once we have enough users in a particular country it makes sense roll out Brave ads.
Will there be any other use case for BAT apart from the started and when will they be implemented?
We plan to release a BAT SDK (software development kit). This will allow BAT to live outside the Brave eco-system. I am sure lots of interesting use cases will emerge as projects add BAT wallets and new ways of paying for attention and content. Off the top of my head, podcasts and video streaming will be interesting to watch.
What’s the largest push back you have seen from advertising partners?
Education about Brave is usually key when dealing with any pushback. People often look at Brave through the lens of what exists already. So they ask how can targeted ads be privacy preserving? Because we bring the ad catalog to your device and your personal information never leaves the device. This is so radical that you can usually see the penny drop in real time as they realize the impact this will have on the ad tech industry.
- A “Brave” New World — Archive.org cooperation with BAT so far
A couple of years back, the Internet Archive signed up to be a Brave ‘creator’. Brave, the web browser that prides itself not only on its speed but also its commitment to privacy and security, launched a program where anyone with a website can get paid by its users. So if you install Brave and spend time on archive.org, you can express thanks in the form of a tiny tip, right there in your browser.
Two years ago, this seemed like a fun experiment. A way for the Internet Archive to support a like-minded tech organization, and at the very least, try out something new. This experiment, turns out, has amounted to something far more significant. And worth sharing.
Katie Barrett, the author of the article, hooked up her cryptocurrency wallet to Brave creator account. Those tiny micropayments that Brave users had tossed into the Archive’s virtual tip jar had accumulated, growing into more than 9k Brave Attention Tokens (BAT) — the equivalent of $2500 USD!
This was an unexpected windfall. It was also proof that the current web, the one that’s driven by ads that know our every move, doesn’t have to be the web of the future. There could be a better way that’s secure, private and supported by its citizenry.
If you use Brave and would like to tip the sites you love, learn how here.
If you publish content on the internet, here’s how to become a Brave creator.
The article covers Brave’s master plan at the company’s offices in San Francisco’s SOMA district.
There are some highlights mentioned in the interview:
- Brave is going to get to 10 million users in the middle of the year. That kind of scale will get you some law students. It will get you some mom-and-Pop users–people who are not tech savvy, but their kids are and they recommended it. They will not know what a blockchain is, but they will understand this idea of rewards or loyalty points.
- Brave is going to do some ads that the browser privately matches against your interests and puts them in the place that the publisher has arranged for Brave to have an ad. That’s how Brave makes money. Note that Brave doesn’t hit the browser’s performance, doesn’t hit page load drain your battery. But it will allow publishers to get the big revenue share. Brave gives 70% to the owner of the ad space. And then Drave gets the same 15% that it gives to the user.
- Brave created the Basic Attention Token (BAT) based on Ethereum as a better alternative to bitcoin because it could do several things with it that bitcoin didn’t allow. The main one was Brave could pre-create a bunch of tokens. Before a billion was sold, Brave created 500 million, and over 300 million of those were used to form a user growth pool that Brave can give to its users in small grants, and give to creators who refer new users. Some users buy the Basic Attention Token and they make a monthly commitment–sort of tithing to their favorite sites — but most users won’t. So Brave is going to give them grants to get them going if they don’t want to donate.
See also:
- Back to Advertising Basics with Web3 Powered by Blockchain
- View Ads, Get BAT: Brave Delivers on ICO Promise of Paid Web Browsing
- THE BRAVE BROWSER WILL PAY YOU TO SURF THE WEB
- Brave rolls out its own ads that pay users a 70% cut
- Privacy-centric browser Brave launches its twist on display ads
- Privacy-Minded Web Browser Brave Introduces Its Own Ad Network
- Blockchain Browser Brave to Reward Users with BAT Tokens for Watching Ads
- Brave will pay web browsers to watch ads with novel digital revenue model
Finance
Network statistics
*There is no up-to-date official information on Brave’s monthly and daily active user base.
Total amount of Brave Browser Publishers:
- Youtube publishers: 73 405
2) Website publishers: 18 832
3) Twitch publishers: 7 329
Roadmap
The BAT roadmap in 2019 is GitHub. More information you can find here.
- 2019:
Milestone 7: 0.60.x (done)
- Rust support for brave-core.
- Ads integration into Brave-core with foundations to support Rust based blind token confirmations
Milestone 7: 0.61.x (done)
Milestone 0.63.x (~April 23, 2019)
- Unify exception handling (done)
- Fix Brave shields localization (done)
- Make Widevine UI more noticeable (done)
- eTLD+1 matching for about:adblock (done)
- Working ads model, Rust-based blinded tokens for privacy-safe confirmation of ad views and interaction, and ability to give BAT monthly to users who see ads (done)
- Settings/Bookmarks/History/Downloads facelift (petemill, in progress; partially merged) (done)
- Add options for allowing FB login / embeds and Twitter embeds
- Upgrade to Chromium 74 (Max, in progress)
Milestone 0.64.x (~May 14, 2019)
- Custom ABP filter rules in about:adblock (done)
- UI improvements and support for theming in the Brave shields panel (done)
- Support for Nightly builds (done)
- Override regional ad-block selection in about:adblock
Milestone 0.65.x
- In page translations (Jocelyn, in progress)
- Add support for more locales
- Smart Tracking Protection (Pranjal, in progress)
The full information can be found here.
Partnerships and team members
No updates
Rumours
No updates
Social media metrics
The charts above illustrate the changes and overall growth in the number of Twitter, Medium, Telegram followers and Reddit subscribers.
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of BAT Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
