When
Mozilla co-founder and former CEO Brendan Eich revealed the Brave Web
browser back in January, the idea behind the browser was to block intrusive
ads that slowed down the performance and the loading speed of a website.
It also restricted the loading of other data collecting technologies
such as analytics scripts and impression-tracking pixels. It would allow
native, trackerless ads from publishers themselves, as well as
non-intrusive safe optimised ads from Brave's own ad network.
Last
week, Eich detailed the company's
plan for a user-publisher-browser revenue sharing model for the Brave
Ad Network, and the Bitcoin-based micro-payments system for users and
publishers called the Brave Ledger. The move will see both users and
publishers paid in Bitcoin for viewing and serving non-intrusive Brave
Ad Network ads, and maintain Bitcoin-based Brave Wallets for payments.
The company has released a developer specification of the Brave Ledger
system for discussion, seeking to ensure a streamlined model that
doesn't present complexity to the user, while giving granularity and
protecting privacy.
It's all based on two basic states users can
choose to be in - ad-replacement mode and ad-free mode. However, users
can also specify certain sites that they want to view in ad-free mode,
while viewing all remaining websites in ad-replacement mode.
While
viewing sites in ad-replacement modes, users will be served ads on
those sites where the browser detects an available non-intrusive ad slot
from the Brave Ad Network. These ads are mapped to 'a fixed set of
general interest categories', based on the user's browsing history. " No
other information is disclosed and no unique or persistent identifiers
are used," Eich insists.
Users, ad-matching partners, publishers,
and browsers are then paid from the total revenue generated from the
advertiser. Eich explains, "Once an ad campaign is reconciled and our
advertising partners pay us, the total views from the ad-replacement
users are aggregated into a weighted list for publishers. From the total
payment, our ad-matching partner takes a share (15 percent), we take
our share (15 percent), we reserve the user revenue share of the total
payment (15 percent) for ad-replacement users, and the remaining amount
is allocated to the publishers (e.g., 55 percent). The payment to each
publisher is then calculated using the weighted-ratio method."
In
the ad-free mode, users can choose to pay sites they are visiting with
the money accrued in their Brave Wallet from the ad-replacement mode, or
with funds they add to this wallet. The Brave browser will include
preferences panel that will allow users to decide how they want to
support the top 10 sites they visit. "You might prefer to pay your top
10 sites equally, or you might prefer to exclude a particular site or
two, and so on," the company adds.
Users can also transfer the
Bitcoin money out of their wallets, but for that, they will have to
verify their identity to comply with regulations. "If you choose to
verify your identity, then you'll need to demonstrate control of a phone
number and an email address. Even so, there will be no way for Brave
Software to correlate your browsing history with payments to your
wallet," Eich explains.
Publishers will also have to verify their
wallets to get paid, and Eich warned the process will be more stringent
than the user-facing one, and be proportional to the size of the
publisher.
"One of the nice features of the ad-free model is that
accounting is entirely transparent - everyone (users and publishers) can
examine the BTC blockchain and see the transfers going to and from the
Brave Software escrow accounts," notes the company in a blog.
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