Why Pixeldrain supports Brave
For many years now Pixeldrain has been partnered with the Anonymous Advertising network. A-Ads is a network providing complete privacy and transparency for all its users, publishers and advertisers. You can for example view a complete list of advertisers, and ad units right on their website without logging in or anything. You can even see exactly how much every website gets paid and how many visitors they are getting.
That sounds great right? Well, there’s a problem. Because everyone on the network is anonymous it attracts a lot of scammers and hackers.
For example, just today I found out that Pixeldrain is serving advertisements for pyramid schemes and services that literally claim they can hack any social media account for bitcoins. That’s pretty bad.. Luckily the campaigns are curated, and publishers are allowed to filter shady, gambling, investment and adult ads. The catch is that pretty much all campaigns fall under those categories, so if pixeldrain were to filter them it would cut out the entire revenue stream.
Two months ago I signed Pixeldrain up for Brave, which is trying to reinvent advertising on the internet. Brave is a web browser focused on privacy and speed. For example, Brave has ad blocking and tracker blocking built right in. No need to install any extensions or anything, it’s enabled by default. As I’m writing this Brave reports that it has blocked 5 tracking scripts right here on Medium.
Another cool thing about Brave is that it contains a built-in cryptocurrency wallet. Users can earn tokens by receiving free token grants or viewing privacy-respecting ads from their browser window. These coins will then be distributed among creators on the web (like me), so that we can do what we love without having to pollute our creations with advertisements which totally break the design and immersion of the product. Brave allows users to directly support any creator they want. It will also measure which websites you pay the most attention to and automatically distribute rewards to those websites (like anything in Brave, this is totally optional).
And here is why all this is relevant to Pixeldrain. In the two months that Pixeldrain has been signed up with Brave it has earned the website 30$, which is far more than A-Ads usually earns, and I didn’t even promote it very much. When people install and use Brave from my referral link a donation of 5$ will be made to Pixeldrain. All this money will go to paying for storage space on Sia, hosting and bandwidth costs of course.
That’s why I’m replacing the advertisement with a referral link as an experiment. From now on there will not be an advertisement on Pixeldrain’s download page anymore. Instead there will be a button to download Brave browser and a link to this blog post. And the best part is: if you’re already using Brave you will not see any promoting at all! (once this issue is fixed) Pixeldrain will gratefully thank you for using Brave and that’s it.
I hope you’re willing to give Brave a shot and support Pixeldrain in the meantime. Download Brave browser and start taking control of your privacy again.
Have a great day.
