Brave browser, the ad-blocking web browser now plans to pay its users for consuming ads. The company will pay in its own cryptocurrency called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT if you decide to watch the ads. The latest version of the desktop web browser will give 70% cut from ad revenues to its users.
This comes close on the heels of the company’s January announcement of an early access program that received a massive response. Brave Ads offer an option of redeeming the crypto token for real-world rewards like gift cards and restaurant vouchers. You can even convert these tokens into real currencies.
Brendan Eich, JavaScript creator and co-founder of Mozilla started Brave Software in 2016. It created a browser that basically blocked ads by default. By blocking the ads, the company observed dramatic improvements not only in performance but also in memory usage and device’s battery life.
Brave Software CEO Brendan Eich believes that the ads on browsers have become spyware and ad-tech is riddled with online fraudsters. Brave receives a massive response of 5.9 million users each month. Having said that, it is still far from Google’s dominance in the browser space with billion-plus users.
The company is launching a phase-wise effort for Brave Ads. In the first phase, users can keep 70% of the revenue. The second phase will involve working closely with website publishers to offer 15% of each ad’s revenue.
Brave wants to show targeted ads as well, but it will let the browser decide on targeting without spilling your data over network to publishers, advertisers, or the Brave staff.
It’s quite possible that Brave is being little too optimistic. The browser has a relatively tiny user base. Even advertisers might balk at entering a platform that does not let users see ads. The possibility of being paid for viewing ads on the internet is quite intriguing. Let’s see how Brave fares up in this area.