What is Brave Browser? How is it Changing the Ad Ecosystem?

A few days ago, I was talking to my wife about buying an air fryer. Next moment, I start seeing ads about air fryers on my social media feed. And I am not alone. Even you might’ve experienced searching for a product and getting ads related to it all over the internet. Well, that’s how web2.0 works. Platforms like Facebook and Google track your activity and then sell it to brands to showcase targeted ads to you. But then, just like every other industry, Blockchain comes to the rescue. Today we talk about what is Brave browser and how is it changing the very ecosystem that I just mentioned.

Issues with Web 2.0 Advertising Model:

I use the terms web 2.0 and web 3.0 assuming that you are well versed with the difference. In case you aren’t, here’s something that can help. Anyway, so big tech giants like Facebook are using your data to make money. This model sounds crooked on the face of it. However, there might be some issues that you may not even realize. Let’s talk about them:

A. Monetary Cost:

Yup. Ads cost you money. On an average, third party apps and trackers consume up to 50% your mobile data. Well, if you are living in India, this might be a menial amount. However, consider this: every night you struggle for data because you have consumed your daily quota. If there were no ads, your day could have easily sailed by.

B. Time Cost:

Since these ads load even before the actual website, you are wasting a significant chunk of your time while using the internet every day, all day. I am not even considering the fact if you get carried away by one of these ads and let go the task you were set out to do.

C. Battery:

Since every scroll now means additional queries or additional download of data, your phone’s battery life is impacted. Statistically, this is at an average of 20%. Yes, your phone’s battery capacity is impacted because you are served with ads all the time.

What is Brave Browser?

Well, to counter the aforementioned issues, Brian Bondy and Brenden Eich developed a web and mobile browser called Brave. Brian has been a former employee of Khan Academy and Mozilla and Eich created Javascript and co-founded Mozilla. Can we just rule out our fears around credibility already? Who knows browsers better than these two gentlemen.

Brave is a fast and privacy first web browser and a blockchain based digital advertising platform. Brave aims to restructure the entire ecosystem of how users, advertisers and publishers interact with the internet.

Since the Brave browser has inbuilt ad blocker, your privacy is put first. Secondly, since there are no ads, it is up to 3x faster than other browsers.

How Does Brave Restructure Ad Economics?

I will explain this with the help of my blog and that could literally be applied to any other website. As a creator put in a lot of work to write these blogposts. Since I wanted to earn additional revenue, I signed up for Google Ads.

Now Google has a lot of data about people visiting my site (or any other site for that matter). They package these preferences and sell it to brands. Whatever money these brands pay to run ads, I get about 68% of it and Google takes the remainder 32%.

Now the two key challenges that I face are as follows:

• Readers may not like these snoopy ads ad thus ruining their experience. I could reduce the number of ads, but it would impact my revenue as well.
• Some savvy readers could install ad blocker. Thus, bringing down my revenue to zero for that visitor.
• Also, if a user actually likes an ad and clicks it, they don’t get anything for their attention. Google basically used that very data to earn money. So a big piece of user remains unincentivized.

Brave Model:

Unlike big tech like Google and Facebook, Brave doesn’t track you all over the internet to gather data about your preferences. As a matter of fact, if you are viewing this on Brave browser, you will get no ads. However, I can still get paid because I signed up for the creator program.

As a user of Brave browser, you have full control of how many ads you want to see from 10 per hour down to ZERO.

So here’s the secret sauce. Unlike Google and Facebook which invade your privacy in the name of targeted advertisement, Brave approaches this by tracking user attention and engagement in real time. They track what tabs are you working on and how you are interacting with each of them. This data is not sent back to some centralized server.

This enables Brave to learn what kind of ads need to be shown basis your consumption of particular type of content. For example, if you are like me, you’d get crypto specific ads all the time.

Win-Win-Win Model:

The native cryptocurrency of Brave ecosystem is BAT or basic attention token and we are going to talk about it in much more detail in the upcoming blogposts. For now let’s understand how this model is creating happy advertisers, content creators and users.

When I publish a blogpost, a brand could reach out to me directly and pay me in BAT to run ads for them. Once I agree, these ads go live on the website.

Now using the attention and engagement model for the users we discussed above, these ads are pushed only to the relevant users. So brands get a chance to reach targeted audience.

Remember the missing piece we talked about? It’s taken care of, here. As a user you can chose not to see any ads. But if you do, you would be rewarded in BAT as well. So basically, there’s no middleman like Google or FB here. It’s directly the brand, creator and the user. Some users earn up to $100 per month. Since I rarely click on any ads, my earning is limited to about $10 per month.

While we are on it, let me throw some attention on the BAT logo. This logo evolved from three sides of the equation: User, Creator, Brand. Hence the win-win-win model.

Conclusion:

Well, isn’t that simply amazing? I always pondered over the fact if sustainable social media exists or not. With Brave browser, I think we are getting closer to an answer. In the next blogpost, we talk about the tokenomics of BAT and how can you become a registered Brave creator. Meanwhile, if you are already convinced and plan to buy BAT, CoinDCX is offering it right now in India. Also, here’s what I have saved using Brave browser, so far.

Until Next Time. Got a burning question?

Got questions? Want to take it to the next level? Reach out to me using your preferred platform from the links below

Until next time..

Btw, if you are a seasoned trader or just testing the waters with derivatives, here’s an exchange specifically meant for that. Head over to MCS using this link. Still not convinced? Join the vibrant community that is talking about MCS on Telegram, here.

For our beloved “non readers”, I also do quick carousels on these topics over Instagram. Come join the fun. Hit me up here.

This blog post is part of the blog challenge ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla in collaboration with Mojo Box – A great way to sample brands before buying them