Brave New World

I enjoy exploring new services and products that have the courage to challenge well established existing companies. Brave is a new cross-platform browser available as an alternative to whatever you are using now. A classic tech business model seems to be doing what your competitors don’t and for alternatives to Google Chrome (Apple Safari, Firefox) this seems to be blocking ads and protecting against the collection of personal information. Brave is in this camp. This makes Brave very fast and it offers convenient controls for avoiding ads and cookies.

The image above shows the security controls and yes there are ads (I always use the Free Tech for Teachers site when I want to check for banner ads, but these are not the type of ad that is based on your browsing history).

I have mixed feelings about ads as a content producer. Users seldom click on the Google ads that accompany my posts so I make very little money from my offerings. This is not a concern to me, but I am interest in what this could mean to others committed to generating reasonable compensation for producing their content.

Brave has a plan for this situation. Brave intends to allow users to offer micropayment to the sites they visit. I have encountered this one time before. The idea is that as a user you commit a certain amount per month and this money is then offered to those you visit (and designate). I am interested in doing this as a consumer, but I am waiting to I am home and have access to my desktop machine because it appears that the synchronization of multiple platforms is yet quite primitive and the cross-platform payment option is not yet available. Payment and collection requires bit currency systems and I assume this will be an impediment until things are easier.

Reports I have read on the Brave business model have me confused. This ComputerWorld description seems to imply that Brave will partly fund itself by substituting its own vetted ads for existing ads. I read the Brave material as offering this as an option and not a requirement.

I promise a followup to this post as I have time to explore the funding model. For the time being, I think that Brave is worth exploring just for the speed advantage it offers. Note that many of the plugins you count on when using Chrome will not be available, but these enhancements will likely be coming if the company takes off.