Better browser == Better Internet

If you only have 1 minute

• Problem with web status quo: too many ads on the web, we are being tracked by advertising companies using "cookies" often referred to as "trackers".
• New web browser Brave was created to solves these problems. It has built-in ads and tracker blocker.
• Content creators are people too. When we block ads in our browsers, they don't get paid. Brave has therefore builtin tipping system to support your favorite or a frequently consumed content creators.
• Brave has also mobile version! Block ads on mobile to save your data, battery, performance and enjoy smooth web experience.

If you have 6 minutes

Advertisements are fuel of the web. Big portion of content creators, whether individual bloggers or divisions of writers are living off displaying ads. That's great, because it enables creative people to dedicate their life to creating content we enjoy. We are paying for all of it seamlessly by invisible currency - our attention. We look at ads. 

That itself comes with 2 main trade offs

1. Unpleasant web experience. The web is full of ads selling you products, videos are interrupted by ad spots. Especially with mobile, I guess we you'd agree with me that it's quite distracting. The ads on mobile also drain the battery, causes unnecessary data consumption, slows down the device. If you are one of the people who have never used ad-blocker, you might yet have to give it a shot. It's a whole new universe.
2. You are being spied on. Not that anyone probably really cares about you as individual. For advertisers, you and your devices are just a data point. They need to identify all your devices so that they can display you relevant ads and maximize their revenues.

How the money flows

Let's understand how the money flows in web advertising. At high level, the system has following actors:

• you,
• content producers,
• advertising platforms,
• advertisers.

The money flows like this.

Advertiser -> Advertising platform -> Content creator

The content creators (whether it's an individual blogger or a news website) sign up with an advertising platform. When you visit a website of content creator, you get served ad. An advertiser paid advertising platform so that they will display ad for their product on appropriate places to appropriate people. Advertising platform then pays the content creator, because you viewed the ad through the creator's website.

When you view ads, you exchange free content with your attention. That's what makes the relationship between Advertising platform and Content creator works. If you end up buying a product from Advertiser, the loop is closed.

How advertising platforms track you

You've surely experienced this in practice before. You've searched for some product and suddenly it's advertised to you all over the web. Let's see how this magic works.

The content creator puts on his website piece of code on which is connected to an advertising platform. When you visit this website, the advertising platform does 2 things:

• serves an ad(s) to you,
• stores and/or read a specific piece of data in your browser called "cookie".

The decision of "What ad should be displayed?" is related to the cookie. In nutshell, when you visit a WebsiteA.com affiliated with advertising platform AdvertisingB, the advertising platform will store some ID number in your browser (cookie). Later you visit WebsiteC.com which affiliated with the same company AdvertisingB, the AdvertisingB can then check existing cookie in your browser and recognize that you are the same person who visited WebsiteA.com before. They will also note that you've just visited WebsiteB.com and use this information next time they serve you an ad.

The reason they track you is to understand who you are, so that they can display relevant ads and maximize their revenue.

Solutions to ad blocking

Let's compare 2 solutions to ad blocking - traditional ad blocking in comparison with Brave.

Simple, flawed solution: "Just block it!"

You can always use ad blocker. There's at least one per each major desktop browser. From the user perspective, it's perfect. No more pop ups. No more banners. No more video autoplay ads.

The problem is that this is not fair. You are consuming content someone produced, yet you are not willing to indirectly contribute your 2 cents to their revenue. When you don't get to see ads, creators of the website it's displayed on won't get paid.

If everyone block ads, news sites, youtubers, bloggers and other content creators will go broke.

The brave solution - "Let's be fair!"

Brave blocks ads, because they make web experience crap. To keep content creators rewarded, Brave created virtual credit called "Basic Attention Token" or BAT.

You can send BAT to frequently viewed youtube channels or websites with a click of a button. Once they receive BAT, they exchange it for fiat money. 95% of the tip goes to the receiver, 5% goes to Brave for development and maintenance.

To accelerate networks effects of the ecosystem, when you start using Brave on desktop, you will receive few BAT tokens every month, but you can only spend them by tipping them to content creators.

Solutions to tracking

You've learned why websites advertising platforms are trying to track you. Let's compare the outcomes of blocking 3rd party trackers manually VS automated blocking in Brave.

Simple tracker solution - "I'll click through cookie policies!"

The web tracking and privacy is issue which was acknowledged by EU too. If you live in EU, you must have noted that since spring 2018, websites have started to ask you for consent to use cookies advertising purposes. It gives you options set up your privacy and select which advertisers you want let track you.

The problem with this is that these cookie policy pop-ups are tailored to discourage user to disable trackers. And privacy is not always default.

Let's take a look at one of such deceiving cookie policy pops on American weekly magazine https://newsweek.com. When you visit the page for the first time, you will be asked if you agree with cookie policies.

Now I mindlessly hit Agree & Close, because "they respect my privacy", I've just gave consent to hundreds of companies to track you. Let's dig a little bit deeper. If you click the smaller "Learn More ->" button (Ain't nobody got time for that!) you will see these options

Privacy is not the default. Now note the greyed out partners button. One would assume it's not clickable, but actually it is. If you click, you will see following list of partners.

I counted them so you don't have to. There's precisely 462 different advertising companies. But who can blame newsweek.com? This is how they make living and European cookie policy is not helpful for these publishers. It's in their incentive for you to not disable 3rd party trackers.

Another problem is that if you actually decide to block cookies/trackers, you will get served highly irrelevant ads. They are more annoying than tracker-powered ads. Sometimes plain nonsense click-baits.

The brave solution to cookie trackers - "Privacy be default, always"

Simple. Brave by default blocks all adds and all trackers. You don't need to spend minutes going through different cookies policies on each website you visit.

By the way, Safari reportedly as well blocks 3rd party cookies by default. Firefox and Chrome might be able to, but don't do so by default.

So, no advertisements on web, EVER?

Actually, Brave has on roadmap another feature. Users will have option to watch ads and get paid BAT for it in return.

Why I like Brave

• Smoother web experience on both desktop and mobile
• Ad blocking on mobile - also saves battery and data.
• Mechanism to effortlessly support content creators
• Privacy by default - no more 3rd party tracking
• Promotes Duckduckgo over Google. Duckduckgo.com is privacy preserving search engine.
• Builtin TOR for tech savvy users.

The ideas behind Brave are direct reflection of the fact that the web is not as free, as it appears. We are all paying for it with our attention. Whether it's small publishers or corporations such as Facebook, Twitter or Google.

Be brave on desktop!

If you found the article I wrote useful, you can download Brave via my referral link here. If you end up sticking with Brave for a month, I'll receive a few BAT tokens. Otherwise you can download from official brave website.

After you use Brave on desktop for month, you will also receive about $5 worth of BAT tokens. The point is, however, you can only spend these for tipping to content creators.

Be brave on mobile!

Mobile doesn't currently include integration with BAT tokens, hopefully in the future! However, it blocks the ads. You can get Brave on AppStore and Google Play.

Wrapping up

Let me know what you think about the ideas behind Brave. Are you going to try, or have you ever?