This is not financial advice.
During the last two weeks BAT didn’t illustrate high social activity in media landscape. The main keynote of BAT’s activity was Brave Sync launch. It enables users to automatically sync browsing data between devices running the Brave browser. Now Brave Sync supports bookmarks. Other data will be available in the coming months. Moreover brave browser users can now earn $70 a year for watching ads. The reward is paid out in the cryptocurrency BAT (Basic Attention Token) and deposited into a wallet built into the browser.
Development
Brave Sync is now available in today’s Brave for iOS release (version 1.9). Already a feature in the Brave desktop browser and Brave for Android app, Brave Sync for iOS enables users to automatically sync browsing data between devices running the Brave browser.
Brave Sync currently supports bookmarks. Other data such as tabs, history, passwords, autofill, as well as Brave Rewards, will be available in the coming months.
Brave Sync is completely opt-in. Once you enable it on one device, it is easy to add more devices to Brave Sync by scanning a QR code or entering a secret phrase on the new device. More details are available here.
Brave Sync provides the privacy and security that users expect from Brave. Brave Sync is always end-to-end encrypted with a key controlled only by the user. This means Brave’s servers never see user data, since they do not have access to these encryption keys. Brave servers also can’t tell which types of devices are making updates or how many devices there are.
The @brave Beta channel now features Brave Ads for testing. Users can opt in to view private ads via Brave Rewards, and will be able to claim BAT accumulated for having viewed ads. Link to download Brave Beta.
Social encounters
Are there any potential partnerships in the works that the team can talk about?
It’s best not to talk about partnerships before they are agreed and finalized. But things are progressing nicely on this front :)
Do you have a favorite Brave publisher (youtube/twitch/website)?
We have over 80K publishers. I don’t want to play favorites and leave out the other 79,999.
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.
What is the estimated size of the markets in Europe, USA and Asia that BD is targeting and what percentage do you hope to capture in 1 and 3 year timeframes?
The US digital ad market is >$100 billion. That’s a large number. I don’t have numbers off-hand for Europe and Asia but the specific numbers aren’t even that important in my opinion — I know that they’re large and in need of a new solution. We’ll do our best to prove our value to advertisers over the next few years!
In 5 years what capabilities do you see being added/implemented/slightly changed to Brave Browser as a whole?
IMO, Brave ads could evolve to an incredible degree in 5 years. Exciting to see where things go!
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.
Finance
The reward is paid out in the cryptocurrency BAT (Basic Attention Token) and deposited into a wallet built into the browser. The CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich, has projected that, “I would not be surprised if our users can make $70/year as we bring the system up in 2019 — when ad deals will be harder to come by and we’ll subsidize revenue from BAT’s User Growth Pool — and climb by 2020 to above .7 * 320 or $224 net user revenue per year.”
$70 a year might not be a lot but if the projection proves accurate and a user in 2020 can Earn $224, that starts to become a meaningful amount of money. With further improvements that number could grow and as it does it’s hard not to see an influx of users downloading the Brave browser.
Network statistics
*There is no up-to-date official information on Brave’s monthly and daily active user base.
- Number of Brave Browser Publishers 82 838 (Last update: April 11, 2019)
Total amount of Brave Browser Publishers:
- Youtube publishers: 60 133
2) Website publishers: 16 692
3) Twitch publishers: 6 013
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
YouTube-blogger Tom Scott has stated that the Brave browser breaking the law by collecting donations from the audience on his behalf that he did not consent. This became known after Scott published the relevant post to his Twitter.
The blogger also said that the company probably violates the General Data Protection Regulation, opening the collection of funds without the knowledge of the creator of content and preserving the anonymity of people making donations. If this is true, then the creators of Brave can cause serious problems, although they recently participated in the campaign against anticompetitive conduct, running Facebook and Google.
Question Scott about how the practice of storing user data and distribution of donations, without their knowledge, are coordinated with the General Data Protection Regulation remained unanswered — contact person of Brave simply stopped responding to his messages. According to the blogger, Brave believes that the registration of each author in the payment system BAT without an opt-out choice and holding donations made to them without their consent is in complies with the privacy laws.
Scott also said that Brave adheres to this position, because the domain name or the URL YouTube channel is not information, which can be used to identify the person. However, this statement is very doubtful — General Data Protection Regulation states that such information is his property.
Finally, the blogger said that he has already sent a formal right-to-be-forgotten request to Brave under GDPR data ownership framework, as well as a request that all records of any donations collected on his behalf are deleted. Scott argues that Brave has received both requests. According to the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation, the company must give an answer within a month.
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.
