Brave browser update

I haven’t written about Brave for some time. It is my browser of choice, but I am guessing unfamiliar to many who read my posts.

Brave is pretty much Chrome as it is based on the same code base. Most of the extensions I run in Chrome I can also use in Brave. Since Brave and Chrome are pretty much the same, why bother with a browser that is less known. For me, there are two reasons. First, Brave was developed to block ads, scripts, and other data collection tactics related to the collection of usage data often used and sold for various reasons (e.g., targeting ads). Second, Brave does offer ads and an alternate way to compensate content developers.

Why block ads and then allow ads? Brave ads are simple text ads similar to Google ads. These ads are not used to collect information, but because companies pay for the display of the ads (like ads in general) these companies provide a source of revenue. If you want, I suppose you could pay yourself with this revenue, but I don’t think this is the idea. The revenue can easily be shared with content creators in compensation for their effort in providing content or services. This approach respects your privacy as a user of the Internet and also respects the work required to generate the content that provides you a reason to use the Internet.

You can just block all ads. If you do so, I believe it is important to add funds that are distributed to content creators. To me, this is the ethical thing to do. The money you contribute is converted to a cryptocurrency called BAT and you indicate the number of BAT you want to have distributed each month based on the amount of attention you spend on different web sites. Web providers must enroll to collect BAT contributed by Brave users. This is an issue I will return to at the end of this post.

I have experienced BAT funding and the experience has been interesting. When I first joined the Brave ecosystem. I put in $50 just to be part of the experiment. This was before I could collect money from seeing Brave ads and before I could register my web content with Brave. If you look carefully at the image above, you will see that I now own 390 BAT worth $125. How I got from $50 to $125 is mysterious. As I said, at first there was no way for me to earn BAT. I now can earn BAT based on my browsing and Brave users viewing my content. Neither source of income would possibly be responsible for bringing in more revenue than I have committed to provide others. The only thing I can propose is that I have accidently become a cryptocurrency investor and I got into BAT in the early days of Brave.

Regarding registering your content with Brave here are some final comments. As I said, you need to do this if you want to receive BAT in compensation when other users of Brave block ads that might appear on your content. Not enough content and service providers do this. I don’t lose BAT based on the time I spend on sites that are not registered (e.g., Amazon, Google). If you offer web content via a blog or web site, I encourage you to enroll with Brave. It costs you nothing. To make this system of blocking the collection of personal information AND the compensation of content creators work, users must both use this browser and ecosystem and enroll their content.