Let’s have a show of hands – who wants to sign up to receive advertising as they browse the internet?
No-one???
Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, believes users will agree to do precisely that by downloading and using his company’s Chromium-derived browser, Brave.
On the surface Brave is just another desktop/mobile-browser. One that claims it is faster, defaults to using secure HTTPS, and comes with an integrated adblocker and tracker blocker.
The catch with adblocking is that lots of internet publishers would go out of business if that happened on a large scale, which is why Brave offers a second option – let users opt in to receive ads that reward valued sites with a recently-launched virtual ad currency called Basic Attention Token (BAT).
It’s good news for publishers because the more time someone spends on a site looking at ads, the more BATs (which can be turned into real money) that site’s publisher gets from the Brave platform.
Advertisers, meanwhile, will buy BATs to participate in this platform because they will get a lot of detail on how users are interacting with ads and what their interests are.
Will the concept take off? In terms of attracting browser users, it’s hard to see a real path to success. The current 2.7 million users might sound OK, but that’s nothing when compared to the One Billion plus Chrome browser users, through which most ads in the world are currently served. Chrome commands 60.98% of the browser market share with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Edge and Safari following in that order.
Most of the Brave buzz came after its September 2017 Initial Currency Offering (ICO), when it benefitted from the hype around anything to do with virtual currencies and blockchain. However, it’s one thing to appeal to the virtual currency crowd, and quite another to engage with end users motivated by privacy features, some of which are already available on other browsers.
Publishers seem more interested though – at least 8,000 signed up in the first part of this year. At least half of them were YouTube channels, which might be Brave’s main market to begin with.
Perhaps typecasting Brave as a privacy browser misses the point. It’s a prototype for a new way for advertisers, publishers and users to relate to one another without the compromise we see in online privacy today.
It’s likely to be a slow start, but perhaps when more users grow tired of user profiling, they may be inclined to give this new approach a chance. Until then, Brave is an experiment worth paying attention to for its ideas as much as its financial success.
If you want to give Brave a try you can download it here: https://brave.com/
