(disclosure, I work at google, and previously at YouTube)
This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.
With other patronage systems, like patreon, you cannot donate money until the creator has an account. To me, that feels super sketch.
Edit: It reminded me to go and check my old bitcointip and altcointip accounts on reddit, on which I apparently had combined closed to $30 in BTC at today's prices, but which have both been shuttered and are now inaccessible. That's not promising.
The money doesn't go "into a hole". The funds are saved and a creator can retrieve them at any time once they sign up for an account: https://brave.com/publishers/#getverified Basically, it's their money, and whether they decide to withdraw it or not is entirely up to them.
IMO this is the right way to do it because it solves the chicken and egg problem that would normally exist with a universal funding method like this. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favorite creators support; they can just browse the web like normal and the platform takes care of the rest.
It's thrown into an account that the creator can retrieve at anytime. A hole incorrectly insinuates it's never retrievable. This is a good way to get away from Googles monetization handcuffs.
See my edit, if you didn't already, but there exist services that already do that.
The asymmetry created by this kind of "pay me without my permission" means that someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't. That's not a good system if your goal is really to get money to creators.
> someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't
Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.
If your funding method relies on consumers essentially donating their money to you, it's extremely important to make that experience as seamless for them as possible. Patreon is great, but it does require users to go out of their way and make a conscious decision to fund _you_ specifically. That's a lot of extra effort that person has to go through just to give their money away to a random site they happened to visit for a couple hours that month.
With this system however the user just signs up for a single service _once_ and subscribes, and that's the full extent their involvement. The trade-off is that the content creator is now the one who has to go through the extra effort of setting up an account on this service, but unlike content consumers, the creator actually has an incentive to go through that process (free money) which makes it worthwhile for them.
>Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.
And my point is that such a system is unsustainable, due to asymmetry of work.
Lets start with a few things that we can know are true:
1. In any system of patrons and artists, an artist will have more patrons than a patron has artists, or the system is unsustainable.
2. I could create a competitor to Brave, "Fearful", tomorrow. So could anyone else.
As a creator, its possible that every single patron of mine will pay me through a different service, I then need to register myself in all of them, and either manually, or via a middleman, convert the disparate currencies to my preferred one. But, because there are so many different payment methods, its likely that the long tail isn't worth my time to receive payment from. Systems that accept payment on behalf of someone else and require work on the part of that party to receive the payment create this loss.
On the other hand, even if every creator has their own payment platform, there's no loss. Patrons simply don't pay the long tail of the creators that they use, and instead only make payments to the ones they appreciate the most.
iow, asymmetry means that creator-focused services are the only ones that can be successful except for very niche groups. So, if your goal is to support blockchain tech, Brave is great. If on the other hand, your goal is to get paid by patrons, its not.
So your concern is the inefficiencies introduced by creators who never claim their cash?
If the tokens were automatically returned to the consumer after a period of, for example, 6 months or so, and redistributed to creators via the usual method, would that alleviate your concerns?
BAT white paper and roadmap aim at full decentralization. Ethereum is not ready yet, either on scalability or anonymity via ZKP. We're working in phases using ZKP off chain accounting and single-monthly-transaction on, no fingerprint of users or their supported sites.
We're moving this into a whole new realm of problem then. Ethereum smart contracts have been shown as at the very least possible to get wrong by coding incorrectly, at this point multiple times.
I'm not sure taking a straightforward and easily reasoned about process that the courts could easily handle and moving it to something enforced by a programming language subject to bugs that are largely unable to be handled by courts is necessarily a step in the right direction. At least not until there's a lot more vetting of Ethereum and a much better and more secure ecosystem to call upon.
I am but I don't monetize my channel, but know several people that do and have had videos go from monetizable to non-monetizable for what seems to be chimerical reasons. And the autonomous review process to address the situation seems laughable but this is on-par for Googles customer service department/process.
I am, and if Brave can play its card right, they can make a big blow to Google. They just need to get creators on board and right now 90% of creators are pissed at Google/YouTube, so the timing is perfect.
But the status quo of "Put tons of work producing content and hope that youtube doesn't demonetize, because then my patreon links get deleted." is also pretty fucked.
I am just glad somebody is trying to fix content monetization online without taking 30% for, what, handling payments?
Well, in all honesty, youtube does a lot more than "handle payments" - it actually serves those videos, it finds advertisers and collects money, matches content with ads.
You can argue how well it does the job (especially at the last bullet point) but it should be obvious that it does do in fact more than just "collect money".
What if the creator doesn't retrieve it? How long is it held? Will it be returned to the donors? What if it's a large amount? Will they find the creator and give it to them?
It would be unethical (and, quite probably, illegal) to actively solicit and accept donations for a named charity and then hold on to them until the named charity, with whom you had no previous arrangement, actively sought you out and applied for an account which would allow them to receive them.
This is effectively how Amazon Smile works, although the technical details are different: instead of soliciting "donations" they promise that 0.5% of each purchase is given (by Amazon) to the user's charity of choice. But the charity does not receive the money until they "register" their organization with Amazon, and as far as I can tell there is no way for me to know if my chosen organization has done so.
Amazon Smile only works with charities. Charities publicly list their addresses in multiple public databases. Sending a cheque to that address is easy. Not the same thing for non-charity content producers. (Not to mention, taxes.)
But the problem remains the same in that the charities on Amazon Smile (almost one million[1]) were (as far as we know) never informed that money was being collected for them.
Yes they might be contacted, but what if they don't want (or simply can't for legal reasons) use Amazon as a gateway for their funds?
Now you've given users the impression that they are helping a certain charity when it never makes it there.
Theoretically, these same users might have made a small donation directly to that company if it wasn't for Smile.
I'd still recommend using Smile, overall I think it's great, but you have to admit there might have been a better way to go about it. How to do that better, I do not know.
I received an email a few months after signing up for Amazon Smile letting me know that the charity I chose was not able to accept donations and that I needed to choose another one. I did not see an option to forward the funds that would have gone to my chosen charity for past purchases to the new charity, though.
> If your selected charity does not register to participate, becomes ineligible, or requests to be removed from the program, you will have a chance to select a different charity to receive the accrued donations that have not yet been disbursed to your charity. If you do not select a different charity, the accrued donations will be distributed to other organizations receiving donations.
Because if I donate to the EFF and it instead goes to a certain charity that kills something like 90% of the pets it takes in, I'm going to be upset.
If I donate to my favorite YouTube personality and instead the money goes to PewDiePie's empire, I'm going to be upset.
The difference between donations and taxes is that I can choose who to fund and how much. If that choice is no longer mine, and I have a strong chance to fund entities I find morally repulsive, then why donate?
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this is really the same thing.
First of all, Brave doesn't just sit idly by and wait for creators to seek them out; they attempt to contact creators via email to let them know there are funds available for them to claim.
Second, Brave is completely transparent about how the process works. They're not claiming to donors that the funds _will_ reach their intended destination and then not delivering. The method they use to deliver cash to creators is clearly explained on their website.
"Hey, we have money for you! All you need to do is send us your social security number, address and bank account information. This is legit, we promise we're not from Nigeria"
Yep, that's pretty shitty. I don't know what info brave asks for, but I have pretty tight PII requirements for services I use. If I think Braves terms are unreasonable, is there a reconciliation process I can undertake, or does brave just keep my readers tips? Shady as fuck.
I just finished the process. To verify a site, you upload a file to the site, or add a DNS record, and then you can access your BAT. I don't know how you can withdraw, though.
EDIT: Oh, wait, they make you register a wallet on a site called uphold.com, which will just send the tokens to your Ether wallet or convert them to another cryptocurrency or pay you to your bank. You do have to register for KYC after $1000 worth of income, they say.
If I accept donations for ${Charity}, but then say "well they have to actually ask me for it before I send it to them ...", and in the meantime it sits in my bank account, I feel like that _would_ be somewhat unethical.
If the charity had to jump through hoops to receive the donations, yes. If the creators could just get a check in the mail, or BAT were converted to cash and forwarded to an existing patreon, I wouldn't have the same concerns that I do as is.
I'm not sure what you're expecting them to do. They already send creators an email telling them how to claim their money once the accumulated funds reach a significant amount. How is that any less convenient than a check in the mail?
Are you seriously asking about what is less convenient about getting a check in the mail that can be deposited at any bank account in the world vs getting an email explaining the hoops you need to jump through in order to create an account to get access to a BAT tokens which can then be turned into cash by creating another account at some shady crypto coin exchange?
When discussing a system that creates obligations for others, yes it is too much to ask that all users read the docs before throwing stones.
If you donate via this system, you've now created an obligation for me to read an email, look up the company, read their documentation, read reviews and scam reports to ensure that they're legitimate, provide them personal information, then repeat the process for a second site, and then I can get the money you've given me.
Dang, it's people like you that are the reason we can't have nice things. I am pretty bearish on BAT's system myself, and I wouldn't use it personally, but it's your attitude toward this stuff that makes me not want to try to come up with ideas to help content creators or the "advertising problem" on the internet. Stuff like this is why advertising still exists and is unfortunately the superior choice still in monetization even though it is beyond shitty.
I think you're being unreasonably harsh here. You have to consider the perspective of the people you want to help. Lashing out at me for explaining why it's a difficult problem doesn't particularly help solve the problem.
Let me try again:
Think about how much spam you receive on a regular basis.
Now imagine you're in a position where you have fans wanting to send you money: you probably get all the bulk spam plus a ton of targeted spam simply for being notable. This goes double if you have a need for people to be able to message you legitimate business inquiries, because then you're going to get illegitimate inquiries as well.
Then imagine one of the messages in the flood (I know people with six figure unread message counts) that is your inbox said that they had some money available for you, and all you had to do was sign up for their service with your personal information.
You'd be crazy to be willing to do that without researching, likely for several hours.
And if more of these services start popping up, then you have to check up on each one individually as they come in.
That's not something most people in that position can afford to do for 0.01% of their inbox.
Or you could ignore them, but then you're at risk of upsetting your fans because they're trying to send you money and you're not receiving it, out of a quite reasonable assumption that it could be a scam. No one wins in that situation either.
Or, consider the following situation:
Someone you know recommends a donations platform, or you find one while searching, whatever.
You sign up for an account, post the link somewhere, and people use it.
It's much more inconvenient for the users who are giving the money and have to track down what platform you use, but at the same time they also get a level of assurance that any money they send will end up in your hands in the end.
> Lashing out at me for explaining why it's a difficult problem doesn't particularly help solve the problem.
You didn't originally explain why it was a difficult problem at all, all you did was insinuate that most people are too lazy to read documentation, made hyperbolic statements about the difficulty of claiming money, and seemed to suggest that therefore this specific project is a failure or something.
While this post is a bit better at clarifying your argument, the post you're responding to is still 100% in the right here. You may have thought you were helping with it, but the fact is that all most people like to do, is poke holes in reasonable solutions, just because they don't exactly match whatever specific criteria they had in mind. You have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's so easy to come up with criticisms, that even the people you're critiquing have probably thought of them already, much to everyone's astonishment probably. What's not easy, is coming up with any kind of alternatives or possible solutions to these holes, because if it were, they would've likely been implemented.
Believe it or not, all this does is demoralize people actively trying to solve the hard problems you claim to be trying to "help", thus hurting your own cause in the end, because there's no motivation to be gained by helping a bunch of entitled armchair know-it-alls. Despite what everybody may like to think, technological progress is fundamentally a people problem just as much as it is an actual technological problem.
EDIT: Just for full disclosure, as a cryptocurrency investor myself, I also am bearish on BAT. But that's just because I'm bearish on anything having to do with Etherium by default.
The original question was sarcastically asking whether reading the documentation was too much to ask, implying that laziness was the issue. I responded that for the target market, yes, it actually is too much to ask, and not because of laziness.
I didn't come in and say the whole thing was a bad idea and that it should be abandoned. Just that if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience. As well as pointing out that the idea of not requiring opt-in actually causes the friction that it seeks to avoid.
If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag. It's not always true, and it might not be true for all users, but it's something to seriously consider.
If people are worried that your product will appear to be a scam, you absolutely need to reconsider.
> If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag.
I actually agree with this completely, but it's totally orthogonal to key points of the counter-arguments here. Some people thinking your project will cause them issues cannot be inherently bad, pretty much out of necessity, because you simply can never please everyone all the time. If it starts to become a sizable portion of your intended audience, maybe, but even then there will always be a sizable signal/noise ratio as well, which is the real issue here. It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
The problem here isn't one of digging up issues, as anybody that's managed any kind of non-trivial project knows they are plentiful, it's a problem with finding solutions. Therefore, the main counter-argument that's been made here is that simply shouting and pointing at these things is not going to help your case as an end user. It's a pretty straightforward point, but people seem to forget that all projects need to make trade-offs, and that often their contributions aren't totally novel "insights" that the project maintainers aren't aware of.
For example, you state:
> if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience.
Which is true, but arguably anyone doing any kind of business would likely know that already. The trouble is actually coming up with such a short explanation, especially when as was claimed before, people don't like to read documentation. It's not exactly easy to explain Bitcoin in one paragraph, much less smart contracts, and even harder still to explain some etherium-based token, on top of explaining the business model and the reason behind it in such brevity. Which is why, even though I'm also not particularly in favor of this BAT project, I know I have nothing to contribute to it in terms of useful criticism because I acknowledge that it's a hard problem and that they're fighting an uphill battle anyway. The part that I am arguing against, is that many seem to implicitly believe that just pointing out that some project is fighting an uphill battle is enough of a worthy contribution to get their concerns addressed/acknowledged somehow.
The more concerning corollary to this, is not so much that these sorts of responses "discourage" active project developers anyway, but that they de-incentivize future projects from even attempting to bother with hard problems, just because they observe enough of a backlash against previous solutions that they deem the risk-to-reward ratio not worth it, instead of actively exploring the space, when that's exactly what's needed to gain any sort of traction on long-term hard problems.
We already see this happening, with so much manpower going towards developing relatively safe "problems" like scaling social networks and/or optimizing ad delivery mechanisms, instead of encouraging people to try out different/riskier things. And that's the real crux of the issue.
> It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
1.) This issue should be prioritized because it makes the whole endeavor literally appear to be a scam to the exact people it wants to help by sending them money.
2.) It should be addressed by being opt in.
Both of which I did cover in my previous posts.
I get where you're coming from. But this is actionable advice with a very strong reason why it should be prioritized.
In the screenshot of the content creator dashboard, it looks like there is a dropdown menu (BAT to [dropdown]). Can't the creator choose "BAT" in the dropdown and receive BAT (or fiat, or whatever else they like that Uphold supports)?
What makes you think you necessarily need a separate account at an exchange? Theoretically Brave could offer to pay you via pretty much any method you want. (Direct deposit, Paypal, Bitcoin, BAT, or yes, even a check in the mail if you prefer.) They just need a way to verify that they're sending the money to the right person; it's not like they already have your address.
Randomly accepting money from strangers is a bit of a compliance nightmare. You don’t want to chair a charity that winds up having received donations from sanctioned persons.
Oh, I have read emails promising me free money before! Are you saying those might have actually been legit, and that they should not have automatically gone to my spam bucket?
Is Brave going to mail me a cheque if i don't sign up for their creators platform?
This isn't analogous to collecting donations for a charity and then making a bulk donation. It's analagous to collecting donations for a charity, taking a cut of those donations for your troubles, and then depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
We're not taking donations, and there's no requirement the recipient be a charity. This is a user-driven contribution system, users decide to opt in, hold custody of tokens, and let browsing automation + any manual pinning or adjusting the like drive the tokens to creators.
If creators don't register after a decently long interval, the tokens flow back to the user growth pool. Users may choose to support only verified creators/publishers. As we scale up this user growth pool "powerball" effect goes away, and the BAT becomes more dear vs. fiat, so the pool lasts longer as grants and matching scale down in token quantity per user.
No, and that analogy doesn't make sense. Presumably if you bought a gift card for someone you would... give it to them directly. This is someone who says "You need presents for your friends. I will sell you gift cards to their favorite stores! But you can't take the cards and give them to the friends. Instead, I'll hold onto them until your friends come and establish a business relationship with me."
No, you should be asking "is it unethical to ask for donations on behalf of an unaware 3rd party and not send the money unless the 3rd party proactively contacts you and requests it"
Funny you say that. This makes me think of gift cards in the sense that I suspect they will have thousands of tiny balances that are never redeemed. Usually you lose any balance after X years.
They do have thousands of tiny balances that are never redeemed and that's exactly why places are now issuing gift cards for rebates and such. That balance you don't use usually goes right back to them.
well, who's problem is that? why didn't you get it out! its like saying, I left my wallet on a park bench, and that was like years ago! now it's gone! wallets are dumb.
This isn't really a constructive comment. I don't think that my being at google or not affects my ability to judge how ethically sketchy another product is.
Would it be equally unethical to use your position as a defacto monopoly to sell advertising? Let’s not mention ethics about other people considering your employer.
Also as it's since been revealed, if you don't register within 90 days of accruing $100, Brave claims that money to devote to "user growth", iow, marketing for Brave itself. So it really is chucking money into a hole, even more than with those other options.
If the company distributes contributions based on the time spent viewing material, then it's just tossing small bits of money into lots of buckets as users watch videos.
You need to ensure a 100% signup by video creators to ensure every creator gets paid and no money is in a hole. That's simply not possible; many creators are probably dead, unable to access their accounts, or unwilling to sign up for this service.
In that case, a very significant chunk of cash would be collected and never distributed. Relying on 100% adoption by creators to ensure no funds are miscredited is a miserable user experience.
I think many users would like to worry at least a bit about "is that money I'm sending actually getting to guy/gal I want to have it" - I hope that's transparent to them. I'd hate for my small donations to create more paperwork than necessary.
Is that sufficiently clear to the “donor”? Because it sounds like they’re telling the viewers that the their money and voice can reach the content owner via this unrelated third party that has no intention of doing so. That’s clearly unethical
at any time, up until the policy changes. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favourite creators support only if they are unworried about whether their money actually gets to those creators.
> This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.
This comment reminds me of mp3sparks / allofmp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3 , saying they're on the up and up, content creators just have to ask them for their royalties.
Fair point. Brave's system is still better than just blocking all ads without offering an alternate funding mechanism for creators though; and people seem to have no problem with browser extensions that do that.
Yeah, seems pretty sketchy, more or less like sending money via PayPal to random email addresses in the hope that the owner checks it for money. I respect Brave for trying, but accepting money from consumers and holding it until creators sign up to receive it is not good enough.
That in large part is how Paypal got started. You would get an email that said: "You were just paid $25, click here to get your money." and you'd signup for Paypal.
No there was a big difference. Paypal was a referral system and the money came out of Paypal's pocket not the user sending the referral. So if the user never redeemed it was no loss to paypal.
"Where does my contribution go if a publisher/website is not part of this program yet?
When there is about $100.00 USD in BAT for a specific publisher, from all contributors, Brave makes three attempts to complete the publisher verification process. We will hold unclaimed funds for a minimum of 90 days, after which it will be added to the UGP (User Growth Pool)."
I'm now collecting for every charity in existence even though I don't have a relationship with any of them. All they have to do is contact me to retrieve the funds.
revshare is complicated and governed by, among other factors, deals YouTube makes with various parties. Brave doesn't have access to any of that information, so they couldn't possibly know how to split revenue between the uploader of the video and all the other parties that might have content embedded in the video, even if it were their intention to do so.
As a consumer, the direct relationship between me and the content creator is much more important to me than those other issues. Those "other parties" other issues are actually between the various content creators, sponsors, and platform providers, and aren't really my problem. I'm quite tired of those other parties interposing themselves into my relationship with creators.
Right, but as a consumer, you don't have to deal with the ramifications of the other parties failing to be paid, a scenario which generally results in the content creator having their content pulled for incorrect / unauthorized (re-)use.
Right, but as a consumer, you don't have to deal with the ramifications of the other parties failing to be paid
Such issues came up in the old days, but they were settled without interposing themselves directly in my life. Back in the 90's, my music collection didn't start partially disappearing because of these things.
Why would they split anything with youtube sponsers or care about deals they are not a party to. That's youtube's business. In those cases the content creator is paid by two parties.
I think the issue is with collab videos (multiple parties) for which creators can setup a sharing agreement.
In such a video every currency unit inside youtube (Ads, Red, ...) can be split up automatically according to some per-video sharing agreement. Everything that comes through Brave has a single recipient, the channel operator (because Brave can't read this contract).
Not being able to donate money to someone that has no way of receiving that money seems sketch, but letting money rest in the account of a third-party that has no affiliation with the receiver is fine?
As far as I can tell, Brave is doing both. The money rests in a third party account that has no affiliation with the receiver, and they have no way of getting to it until they register.
To put it succinctly, I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
(whereas yeah, I don't consider holding money in escrow unethical)
I believe that they meant YouTube allowing you donate without a receiving account is sketchy compared to Patreon, but their sentence placement/spacing was poor an obfuscated their point.
It does give whoever holds the funds a good deal of float from which they can earn interest. Which is why I have a feeling this has the potential to become the norm.
what's more Brave cuts off the monetization the channels are getting in USD from YT ads. Not good for YT channels, and unclear how it is good for the user other than "hey we figured out a way to cheat the system so you don't have to watch ads!"
Throwing money into a hole is pretty much how the BMI/ASCAP music scheme works for artists who aren't part of their protection racket.
Patreon is worse at this point because they have already demonstrated they will seize and/or not distribute funds to accounts they dislike. That's one step above Paypal levels of horrible business practices.
I just tried this after reading the article here, both on the producer side and on the consumer side.
On the producer side, I registered my site by adding a file to the .well-known directory, and that's it. I can now receive BAT or just USD/EUR to my bank via some service called Uphold.
On the consumer side, it's nice, you top up to your browser directly (so no third-party wallets or anyone to know what you visited, hopefully) and it distributes the money you set per month to the sites you visited, based on the number of visits. I bought some BAT and can definitely see myself using this, if it were not for having to completely switch browsers (I use Firefox and plan to keep doing that).
Overall, good job to the Brave team, the system seems very well-thought-out (I'm not sure about how privacy is handled, but hopefully no third party will know the sites I visited, even though I guess the Ethereum ledger is public and someone could surmise this). Too bad it requires me to switch browsers to use.
EDIT: One problem I saw is with Uphold, which quotes me 51,000 BAT/BTC (and "no hidden fees"!) and then, as soon as I sent the money to buy the BAT, the "activity" page quotes 47,000 BAT/BTC. So much for no fees.
EDIT 2: And now it charges me an extra $4 to withdraw, screw that. I'm not going to spend a load of money on fees so I can spend money on content, so creators can pay more fees.
EDIT 3: And it doesn't even let me withdraw (the "confirm" button stays disabled). Also, I have special hate for forms that say "amount to withdraw", include no fees in that, give you no "all" option and make you guess twenty times which amount will withdraw the closest thing to all your money, while the fee keeps changing every five seconds because of fluctuations. Screw everything about this.
Yeah this isn't going to fly with Youtube itself, they're not going to host ad-free videos so that a 3rd party can take their nontrivial portion of the ad revenue.
Schemes like this are nice, but don't forget who pays for hosting, serving and promoting the content.
I think you might be misunderstanding how it works. Its essentially Patreon. Will it work? Who knows. Can youtube stop it from happening? Probably not any more than they can stop Patreon.
I'm sure YT can't (and probably wouldn't particularly want to) stop the monetization scheme, but the ad-blocking is going to interfere with the main-line business model that gets content creators paid, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's push-back on that (probably in the form of client-server verification the ad has been seen that leads to a good old-fashioned measure / countermeasure arms race to ensure the ads are served if the video is served---after all, how do you snip out the ads if they're baked into the video itself, for starters?).
a straightforward solution would be for YT to have some sort of revenue share bundled in for this feature. "Use our service, we take 5% for hosting/discovery". Basically what Patreon does.
But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt?
Still my understanding is that Patreon doesn't automatically allow people to view YT videos ad free. Sure people get donations and the amount of donations drive the number of videos etc but they don't go into YT's territory.
To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.
Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.
I may be misunderstanding something, since I'm not a youtube creator, but couldn't someone sufficiently comfortable with the other revenue streams they have at their disposal voluntarily choose to demonetize their own youtube videos?
For now, yes. But what people are saying is that if large numbers of YouTube content creators turn off ads and switch to getting their monetary support through Brave, Patreon, or some other income stream that YouTube doesn't profit from, there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to make video ads mandatory.
Agreed. I think it might come down to the entirety of the BAT ecosystem (ad blocking browser, optional ads that you earn $ for turning on, micro donation system in the spirit of patreon). I certainly think its worth watching to see how it unfolds at least.
Not generally, but it has happened. And the Brave business model of "block ads, then show our own ads instead" combined with this type of advertising is probably a clearer target than "some guy making uBlock for free".
I don't know about uBlock Origin (which is what you probably meant) but according to press articles AdBlock Plus gets paid money by Google to not block their ads, which feels at least in the ballpark to what Brave is trying to do.
Imagine this for a moment: the Brave browser ships with a VR headset that automatically descends upon the user's eyes and ears for the duration of an ad, shielding them from their own screen (and thus the Youtube ad playing on it) and playing a different ad (or no ad) instead.
Does the same liability still apply?
I think that Brave lawyers will have an easy time convincing a jury that a merely drawing the user's attention to a different piece of content is not tantamount to damages to some website that happens to be among those open in their browser at the time.
I think it's very closely related to Patreon. But a distinction that they are presumably hoping adds value is fine grained association of payments with how much content is being consumed.
Not directly. But I think the (theoretical) ability to monetize videos in other ways unsticks creators from dependence on the youtube-controlled ad revenue mechanism.
Some youtubers are already incorporating podcast ads (Blue Apron, Naturebox, etc) into their videos. So while I'm dubious of any particular coin trying to add its own monetization layer on top of youtube, I think it's a special case of a general phenomenon that bears monitoring.
I think they mean that there's a set of companies that advertises a lot in various podcasts, and now ads for the same companies, in similar style, are in YouTube videos as well.
(E.g. if you are into photography or related areas, you're going to find Squarespace ads all over the place)
From their contributor terms of service on the BAT website[0]:
"For each website receiving votes during a Calculation Period that is not a Brave Publisher by the end of that Calculation Period, the BAT corresponding to its votes will not be distributed at the end of that Calculation Period, and will instead be held in an Uphold omnibus wallet for no less than ninety (90) days thereafter. At that time, the undistributed BAT may be sent to Company’s user growth pool, which is a pool of BAT that Company administers to incentivize use of the Platform (as described more fully in Exhibit B of the BAT Terms of Sale, available at https://basicattentiontoken.org/terms-and-conditions/). But if the website receiving votes becomes a registered Brave Publisher before the corresponding BAT is sent to the user growth pool, that website will receive such BAT as Publisher Contributions in the first Calculation Period following its registration."
So if you donate money to a content creator that hasn't signed up to be a Brave publisher (and in doing so, agreed to Uphold's ToS), your donation will go to the "User Growth Pool". From their regular ToS:
"Once the User Growth Fund is exhausted, it will be discontinued, and no new BAT will be created for or transferred to the User Growth Fund"
So who knows where your donations will go if the content creator doesn't sign up to receive them.
Lots of people here pointing out minor, easily fixable nitpicks here, completely fail to understand how bad the ad/monetization/content world has gotten. Ad fraud is still an insanely huge problem that companies like Twitch and Youtube constantly wrestle with (former Twitch employee here). Monetization policies are still arcane, unfair, and increasingly untenable for many content producers on Youtube (google "Youtube monetization drama" if you really don't know).
The whole idea that you can pay creators instead of watching ads is obviously a good one, and this is really the best attempt so far at actually solving the problem. Someone suggested implementing this as a chrome extension -- Really? They took an ambitious route with building their own browser, but that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and monetization work on the internet, which if you haven't paid attention, is currently destroying everything good about the Web and eating away at the values of civic society (again, see recent congressional hearings on Russian Manipulation if you've missed the news)
(Disclosure: I hold a small amount of BAT, but mostly discouraged by the finnicky nature of some of these comments that want Everything to be Perfect Overnight without realizing the scale of the problem that Brave/BAT are trying to accomplish)
Edit: If you want more reading on the subject of how screwed the digital content monetization industry is, this link is also sitting on Hacker News a couple stories below this one.
> that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and monetization work on the internet
Why? This doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
In fact, I'd argue the opposite. Depending on users installing and using an entirely different browser just so they can get one feature that could easily be implemented as a browser extension is likely to be a serious obstacle to that goal.
Well. It would a while to explain the business and technological fundamentals if you don’t already understand them. Check out their whitepaper (https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...) for their long-term vision and truly ask youself if this is implementable as a browser extension.
Browsers need disruption anyway — chrome is increasingly buggy and slow, and I trust “the person who literally invented browsers, javascript, and the modern internet” to write another one.
Okay, fine, that’s slightly exagerrated. A key pioneer of the early web, inventor of Javascript, grandfather of the open web movement, and somebody working diligently on core web intrarstructure for over 20 years. That better?
Creating a browser engine from scratch is no easy task. Knowing this, why not use a quality browser such as Chromium as a base and build on it? Their goal and priority are to change the advertising and monetization of the web, not build another engine that would take years and millions of dollars to make.
Is the "ad-free YouTube video experience" something that violates some Google user agreement? Just thinking that Brave is a high profile project and not a tool you download.
I'm surprised YouTube doesn't just block the Brave browser entirely. The entire business model of Brave is "siphon off some of the ad revenue from websites".
Do you mean Microsoft or something else I might be missing? In Microsoft's case, they were punished for their OS monopoly being used to create a browser monopoly by making a default choice for the user, not for abusing its browser monopoly.
Blocking Brave for violating their usage agreements seems very much in another league, even though it might sound like they are building a browser monopoly via their video streaming monopoly. They are not in a position where they take the choice of defaults away from the user, and as long as Firefox, Safari and Edge have some market share, the user still has a choice of compliant browsers. Blocking Brave might be more akin to enforcing their ToS for Youtube via their Play store by blocking 3rd party apps with download function (which is prohibited in Youtube ToS).
That's not what's happening, though. Brave is not running a streaming video service. They aren't hosting or distributing the content. There's nothing illegal about holding money and pledging to give it to someone if they ask for it (as long as you actually do).
That doesn't matter. Torrent websites don't host or distribute any content, yet they still get shut down. Not opposing you, just saying your argument isn't enough.
That doesn't make any sense. Right now, I'm going to start putting money into this jar to my left. I'm going to put a sticker on it that says your name. You can come retrieve this jar if you like. Therefore, I have done something wrong?
Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
> Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
I happen to be working on this right now http://browsercoin.com, if anybody is interested in beta testing it out, my email is in my profile.
> Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
Basically, their FAQ answer is debatable because the Chrome API is more than enough to support a Patreonesque model, if you have uBlock and other privacy focused extension, you don't even need to download a heavy browser client.
Hence the name BrowserCoin, I'd be open to feedbacks on what you would like to see happen with it.
They've confirmed that they will be building extensions for other browsers and expanding BAT beyond the Brave browser. The Brave browser is, of course, the first proving ground and lets them implement the full platform without API limitations, but they've confirmed that insofar as the extension APIs are supportive, they will make extensions.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
It does the same with much more overhead for the user as far as I can tell. The point of Brave is to have everything working behind the scene for the user, so no friction.
What's the "much more overhead"? As far as I know, in the current state of Brave you have to buy tokens, just like you put money in flattr. In the future model, Brave will show you ads vs flattr taking money directly - is that much more overhead?
(The implementations might differ in other important things, e.g. privacy or fee structure, but the basic user attention model seems similar enough to me)
Flattr _used_ to require the user to click a button to indicate they like a particular page and want to support its creator. I assume GP is simply unaware that that's not how Flattr works anymore.
Flattr 2.0 works more like Brave does; the user pays a monthly subscription, and Flattr just automatically distributes those funds to creators based on what sites the user views most often that month.
You can't pay me cents to pick a worse browser. It's like the days when there were those pay to surf companies. The promise of money is nice, but most end users don't benefit that much from it. There's a lot more incentive for the company for their product to work than there is for the users to adopt it.
I'm not deeply familiar with Brave's roadmap but my understanding is that the BAT tokens you'd receive from watching ads could also be used to tip content providers similar to what can be done in Steemit.
Brave is open source, and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web, founded by the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla.
This, so much this. Maybe I could reconsider if they paid me more than a few dollars per good (according to me) advertisement, but I doubt that this will be the case. Until then, I will stick to ad-blocking.
How about this, a system will show you ads and you can chose to skip or stop if you don't like them. In any case for however many seconds you endured, you get paid.
Sounds interesting, but my threshold is probably too high, and I would skip most of them. When was the last time you enjoyed watching an ad? I can't remember, but it's rarely the case. If you combine this with the chance that you are the target of the ads, it's pretty low.
I've invested in BAT during their ICO and today I feel like I'm hustling my investment a little bit. :-)
I mostly use Brave on my phone because it makes the browsing experience faster and removes most ads by default. I won't change to another browser on the iPhone anytime soon. Having said this, I haven't used the payments feature outside of web3 (Ethereum DApps).
I don't watch ads with any interest or attention in general, but I often have Youtube playing some live concert on the background while I work and ads cut midway forcing me to change tabs so I can skip them. The idea that instead of breaking my concentration to stop an add playing I can simply let them and that _that_ could be a little money generating activity seems appealing.
I don't think you have a good understanding of BAT. They are aiming for high quality ads that aren't spammy. The ads will be displayed in something like a private ad tab, and won't be put in in-page slots. So, if you don't want to look at the private ad tab, then it's logically equivalent to not seeing ads. If you want to and be compensated for it, then the option is there. What's wrong with having more options?
Secondly, Brendan Eich already confirmed that there is a 70% revenue share for users. Let's pretend the advertiser is paying 10 cents per view, then you would get 7 cents per ad watched. 70% is a lot.
Thirdly, even if it's just a few cents, it's better than nothing. Things build up over time. Before you know it, you'll have a few $. That's awesome. You can get a month of subscription on a ton of websites for like $3. That's also 3 songs on iTunes store, or a paid app on the app store.
They've confirmed that they will be building extensions for other browsers and expanding BAT beyond the Brave browser. The Brave browser is, of course, the first proving ground and lets them implement the full platform without API limitations, but they've confirmed that insofar as the extension APIs are supportive, they will make extensions.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself. Chromne API gives access to browser history, and making a BAT wallet is pretty easy.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
"The Brave browser provides an ad-free YouTube video experience. It also enables a direct monetary relationship between the content creator and their audience."
Is Google party to this? And if not, how is this sustainable model?
Honestly I hadn't looked into this browser previously, but I don't understand what their value proposition is, beyond handwavey promises that crypto-currency utility tokens and some future machine-learning developments can get around the ad fraud problem.
But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.
I mean, you might then argue that the Echo (and, for that matter, Amazon generally) was insufficiently surreptitious about it. If Brave can be more difficult to distinguish, it will also be more difficult to ban.
No, you might then argue that. :) Look how Uber’s behavior with paging and canceling Lyft rides during their poaching days came back to bite them in the ass. And I’m sure if Amazon’s small army of lawyers felt they had a leg to stand on with the UserAgent obfuscation route, they would do it.
I may be wrong about this, but I don't think the Brave browser intends to allow google to stop them. That's kinda the point of making it a different browser.
What is the technical advantage of Brave using a new token like BAT instead of directly using an existing cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that millions of people already hold, and will likely be less volatile in the long term?
I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no advtange to users.
We floated a User Growth Pool (UGP) of 300M tokens + 60M+ in reserve, created by fiat. These tokens were created before the sale and not sold. They're fungible, indistinguishable from other BAT created pre-sale for lockup to team & advisors, and from the one billion BAT sold on 5/31.
This idea was inspired by social credit currency, issued to citizens to endow them with funds. It can't be done with existing cryptocurrencies unless someone rich does it out of charity. The UGP has notional value between $40M and $110M. No moneybags in sight was volunteering to donate that much BTC or ETH to us.
We had two goals with the sale: endow the UGP, and fund the project. BAT is an ERC20 token so has many decimal places of fractional precision. As we grow, gain users who contribute starting from $0 cost to the user (via grants from the UGP, and even matching contributions for some months), prototype and ship user-paying private ads, and add other apps, BAT should become more valuable and our initial and matching grants can reduce to keep about the same value in USD or other fiats ($5 for initial grant, still working out matching details).
Hope this helps. We're playing the long game here. If the ecosystem expands and Ethereum solves scaling and anonymity on-chain, we will have the only decentralized, user-first and user-private/ZKP-anonymous funding model for the Web.
Here's a pie chart of token holders, where you can see the UGP+reserves, Bittrex (an exchange with BAT held for liquidity provisioning), the team+advisor lockup, and smaller accounts:
But I wouldn't say there's no advantage to users-- an ICO can let the founders (a) raise funds, and (b) give them a financial incentive for the project to succeed.
So in theory, ICOs can help users win because they can lead to great products that otherwise wouldn't exist. (That said, a lot of teams/projects are total junk.)
That might be true in some cases (Brendan Eich, though?) but making your product more complex for the user just to raise easy money seems like a poor trade-off.
On top of that many ICOs seem to have unjustified valuations and reduced oversight from investors vs traditional fundraising.
Wouldn't it be ironic if an ad-blocking browser such as Brave gained popularity with most YouTubers because of Google's self-inflicting YouTube "ad-pocalypse"?
Genuinely asking: how is youtube supposed to pay for their own expenses when everyone uses brave and depletes their revenue stream? Won't that kill the platform itself?
That is the problem of Google, who cares how they pay their bills? Also, if they really wanted, they could block people using Ad/Ublock on their site, but they don't. Why do you care about a multibillion dollar corp? I sure don't.
I'd just like to point out that GP didn't directly present that attitude toward the content creators - just the host/provider, which is quite a different thing.
Replacing ads on the client side is normally associated with the scummiest of malware. I'm not sure how Brave has maintained even a vaguely positive reputation.
I think your statement is overbroad in the sense that adblocking is also replacing ads, in that case with empty whitespace but replacing nonetheless. Brave allows users to put something else in the whitespace.
Brave is putting the ads shown (and more importantly reigning in the out of control user tracking and privacy invading bullshit) in the hands of the user.
A side bonus is $ collected and available to content producers and website owners.
If Brave weren't crystal clear about all -- if they marketed themselves as purely an adblocker, for example -- then I think you'd have a point. As it is, it's simply adblocking with a twist.
The whole thing where they collect money on behalf of someone who may not have an account and may be completely unaware of it seems unethical. It reminded me of a similar snafu with a project called tip4commit, which allows users to give bitcoin to projects they like. It also collected the money for any project on github, without an opt-in (or even an opt-out) mechanism for the project maintainers. Here's the issue where a lot of this got brought up: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127
I never watch youtube videos except for instruction videos and music videos. Why does google insist on going ads only rather than ALSO OFFERING pay per view?
I have the exact same gripe with facebook—their only viable method of supporting content is itself ruining the site. Both companies are just leaving money on the floor by committing entirely to a single (dying) revenue model.
This looks cool, but seems inherently untenable at actually getting the money to the content provider without the content provider working with this service.
Speaking of Youtube Red, the way they handle if you have multiple devices is just so amazingly bad.
I pay for YouTube Red so that I can play music videos on my tv all day without ads. But if I go to a video on my desktop it will stop the playing of the video on the TV as only 1 session can be had with youtube at once IF YOU PAY FOR RED. If I dropped red, and just used ad blockers I will still be available to have multiple video sessions at once.
Drives me up a while and im seriously considering dropping red.
"It then displays it in the Brave Payments list, enabling the user to donate back on a monthly" ... So this will block ads on Youtube, and the creators will be compensated on donations? Does someone have a case-study on content/Youtube creators potentially making a living of donations? This seems like a bad business model: make creative videos and expect people to donate so you can feed yourself.
Creator produces content. I pay creator for content. Did you just suggest that the most traditional, direct business model ever created, value for value, is a "bad" one?
There are really only a couple problems: consumers have become accustomed to freeloading, and that there's no system in place to enable micropayments for content. Once we figure out a way to enable paying, let's say, $0.01 to watch a video or read a news article, the web will fundamentally change in a positive way.
> Creator produces content. I pay creator for content. Did you just suggest that the most traditional, direct business model ever created, value for value, is a "bad" one?
It isn't "value for value", it's a donation. The most traditional, direct business model ever created involves you not having the content until you pay.
People HATE being nickel and dimed. Exactly zero people want to have to think to themselves "is this news article worth 5 cents?" every time they load a web page.
"Value for value" is fine; but the value of watching a video or reading an article is usually about zero to me, something I could easily do without, something that might even carry a negative value since it takes up my time. In fact, since it usually benefits the maker to have more viewers, maybe they should try paying me to watch.
"Consumers" (a problematic term) need a refrigerator to keep food cold, figuratively speaking. They don't need "content." If money is what people care about, they should get into the refrigerator business. (In China, since that's where it is now.)
The web isn't a money machine. If everybody who wanted to get paid for it, got the hell off it or was starved off it, that also would lead to the positive fundamental change of which you speak. Just sayin'.
Median income in the US is ~$42,000/yr last I knew. Call it $4K to make up a bit for benefits and such. There isn't a hard-and-fast way to count because some people hide their total, but there are clearly plural hundreds of people above that line in the top 1000 [1]. There's several more hundred people making poverty-line in most of the US (which as a relative measure, I can't do a precise cut off), and before one starts moralizing about how horrible that is, remember that they are not necessarily doing this as their only job. What may not be enough to live on can still be a very very nicely paying hobby.
You are certainly correct that overall, more money flows through YouTube. I am much less convinced that that's a good thing in general, though. The incentives on YouTube fluctuate a lot, but in general tend to support quantity over quality. In fact as I think about it, I wonder if Patreon is helping prop up YouTube a bit by helping the quality producers resist that; if YouTube banned alternate monetization and tried to survive just on their own quantity-over-quality metrics I wouldn't be surprised they would eventually experience an eat-your-own-seed-corn collapse. I've listened to the YouTube videos of a couple of the people chasing the quantity-over-quality treadmill that YouTube ends up putting them on to stay on top, and it's not a life I'd want or wish on anyone.
Many of them are businesses >> 1 person, and they're not all video. There's no doubt some successful video creators on patreon, but it's still a pretty small number.
Plenty of the video-based ones are in erotic media, too. It's definitely a new and interesting income medium for that genre.
Jordan Peterson was making $60,000/mo (before he hid the donation totals) on Patreon [0]. Obviously it's a steep curve at the top but the big youtubers make good money with that model.
This is not super wide-spread but it's more popular than you think. In addition to a bunch of Patreon-backed people, there's the Erfworld webcomic getting almost $2k per full-page update https://login.erfworld.com/toolshed and Sluggy Freelance with 442 subscribers https://login.sluggy.com/defenders
These business models (Patreon, Twitch subscriptions) have been robustly tested over the last 5 - 10 years, and many people make a living off of it. Are you unaware about these sites and how much money they make? The top Twitch streamers have around 15k subscribers, each at $5 / month, about half of which goes directly to the creator. Do the math and consider switching your career, haha.
Have you seen the industry of livestreaming? That's basically it. I'm not saying it's a good business model but people are making a ridiculous amount of money from it.
Coincidentally, I was just looking at MetaMask which links to Brave. Can someone explain LI5YO how they're related? I understand MetaMask is a browser extension to access distributed transactional content on Ethereum. Not sure how Brave monetisation relates to that.
What happens when the receiver can not (or will not due to legal issues etc) create a Brave account to retrieve the donation? It's lost forever? Will the donator know if their donation was actually accepted or not and if not, can they get their donation back?
Would I technically owe taxes on tokens received even if I'm never notified of having received them?
Yes, I understand that if it's not reported it's unlikely anyone will be caught, but by the letter of the law does receiving a token mean I've received income?
(disclosure, I work at google, and previously at YouTube)
This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.
With other patronage systems, like patreon, you cannot donate money until the creator has an account. To me, that feels super sketch.
Edit: It reminded me to go and check my old bitcointip and altcointip accounts on reddit, on which I apparently had combined closed to $30 in BTC at today's prices, but which have both been shuttered and are now inaccessible. That's not promising.
The money doesn't go "into a hole". The funds are saved and a creator can retrieve them at any time once they sign up for an account: https://brave.com/publishers/#getverified Basically, it's their money, and whether they decide to withdraw it or not is entirely up to them.
IMO this is the right way to do it because it solves the chicken and egg problem that would normally exist with a universal funding method like this. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favorite creators support; they can just browse the web like normal and the platform takes care of the rest.
It's thrown into a hole in exactly the same way that my $30 I tipped btc is not mine, because I never got it out of the system.
Edit: I said it better in response to a sibling of yours: I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
It's thrown into an account that the creator can retrieve at anytime. A hole incorrectly insinuates it's never retrievable. This is a good way to get away from Googles monetization handcuffs.
See my edit, if you didn't already, but there exist services that already do that.
The asymmetry created by this kind of "pay me without my permission" means that someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't. That's not a good system if your goal is really to get money to creators.
> someone providing a service now has to do a lot of extra work if they want to get paid, whereas a user who wants to pay someone doesn't
Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.
If your funding method relies on consumers essentially donating their money to you, it's extremely important to make that experience as seamless for them as possible. Patreon is great, but it does require users to go out of their way and make a conscious decision to fund _you_ specifically. That's a lot of extra effort that person has to go through just to give their money away to a random site they happened to visit for a couple hours that month.
With this system however the user just signs up for a single service _once_ and subscribes, and that's the full extent their involvement. The trade-off is that the content creator is now the one who has to go through the extra effort of setting up an account on this service, but unlike content consumers, the creator actually has an incentive to go through that process (free money) which makes it worthwhile for them.
>Exactly. This system makes things easier on users at the expense of making it harder on creators. I think that's kinda the point though.
And my point is that such a system is unsustainable, due to asymmetry of work.
Lets start with a few things that we can know are true:
1. In any system of patrons and artists, an artist will have more patrons than a patron has artists, or the system is unsustainable.
2. I could create a competitor to Brave, "Fearful", tomorrow. So could anyone else.
As a creator, its possible that every single patron of mine will pay me through a different service, I then need to register myself in all of them, and either manually, or via a middleman, convert the disparate currencies to my preferred one. But, because there are so many different payment methods, its likely that the long tail isn't worth my time to receive payment from. Systems that accept payment on behalf of someone else and require work on the part of that party to receive the payment create this loss.
On the other hand, even if every creator has their own payment platform, there's no loss. Patrons simply don't pay the long tail of the creators that they use, and instead only make payments to the ones they appreciate the most.
iow, asymmetry means that creator-focused services are the only ones that can be successful except for very niche groups. So, if your goal is to support blockchain tech, Brave is great. If on the other hand, your goal is to get paid by patrons, its not.
So your concern is the inefficiencies introduced by creators who never claim their cash?
If the tokens were automatically returned to the consumer after a period of, for example, 6 months or so, and redistributed to creators via the usual method, would that alleviate your concerns?
Some, although not all. My concern is that doing that shouldn't be possible if the platform is decentralized.
Of course it's possible. Etherium, for example, would make that sort of thing trivial.
BAT white paper and roadmap aim at full decentralization. Ethereum is not ready yet, either on scalability or anonymity via ZKP. We're working in phases using ZKP off chain accounting and single-monthly-transaction on, no fingerprint of users or their supported sites.
The token is an Ethereum token, so it's totally possible to do it in a decentralized way using a smart contract.
We're moving this into a whole new realm of problem then. Ethereum smart contracts have been shown as at the very least possible to get wrong by coding incorrectly, at this point multiple times.
I'm not sure taking a straightforward and easily reasoned about process that the courts could easily handle and moving it to something enforced by a programming language subject to bugs that are largely unable to be handled by courts is necessarily a step in the right direction. At least not until there's a lot more vetting of Ethereum and a much better and more secure ecosystem to call upon.
I still feel the benefits outweigh the risks of being at the whim of Google's inscrutable changes.
Are you a youtube creator (or someone in a similar space, twitch streamer, freelance journalist, etc.)
I am but I don't monetize my channel, but know several people that do and have had videos go from monetizable to non-monetizable for what seems to be chimerical reasons. And the autonomous review process to address the situation seems laughable but this is on-par for Googles customer service department/process.
I am, and if Brave can play its card right, they can make a big blow to Google. They just need to get creators on board and right now 90% of creators are pissed at Google/YouTube, so the timing is perfect.
But the status quo of "Put tons of work producing content and hope that youtube doesn't demonetize, because then my patreon links get deleted." is also pretty fucked.
I am just glad somebody is trying to fix content monetization online without taking 30% for, what, handling payments?
Well, in all honesty, youtube does a lot more than "handle payments" - it actually serves those videos, it finds advertisers and collects money, matches content with ads.
You can argue how well it does the job (especially at the last bullet point) but it should be obvious that it does do in fact more than just "collect money".
I was speaking more of platforms like patreon.
What if the creator doesn't retrieve it? How long is it held? Will it be returned to the donors? What if it's a large amount? Will they find the creator and give it to them?
> I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
Would it be similarly unethical to accept donations to {charity} without first getting their approval?
It would be unethical (and, quite probably, illegal) to actively solicit and accept donations for a named charity and then hold on to them until the named charity, with whom you had no previous arrangement, actively sought you out and applied for an account which would allow them to receive them.
This is effectively how Amazon Smile works, although the technical details are different: instead of soliciting "donations" they promise that 0.5% of each purchase is given (by Amazon) to the user's charity of choice. But the charity does not receive the money until they "register" their organization with Amazon, and as far as I can tell there is no way for me to know if my chosen organization has done so.
Amazon Smile only works with charities. Charities publicly list their addresses in multiple public databases. Sending a cheque to that address is easy. Not the same thing for non-charity content producers. (Not to mention, taxes.)
> Amazon Smile only works with charities.
They work with any type of nonprofit, not only charities.
I don't think it's a fair comparison. When you select your charity Amazon Smile directly says:
"We will reach out to the organization you select to ensure it is ready to accept donations from Amazon."
Furthermore, you aren't able to free form enter a charity. It's only from the list they've sourced (presumably from public records).
But the problem remains the same in that the charities on Amazon Smile (almost one million[1]) were (as far as we know) never informed that money was being collected for them.
Yes they might be contacted, but what if they don't want (or simply can't for legal reasons) use Amazon as a gateway for their funds?
Now you've given users the impression that they are helping a certain charity when it never makes it there.
Theoretically, these same users might have made a small donation directly to that company if it wasn't for Smile.
I'd still recommend using Smile, overall I think it's great, but you have to admit there might have been a better way to go about it. How to do that better, I do not know.
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_dshb_leli_...
I received an email a few months after signing up for Amazon Smile letting me know that the charity I chose was not able to accept donations and that I needed to choose another one. I did not see an option to forward the funds that would have gone to my chosen charity for past purchases to the new charity, though.
> If your selected charity does not register to participate, becomes ineligible, or requests to be removed from the program, you will have a chance to select a different charity to receive the accrued donations that have not yet been disbursed to your charity. If you do not select a different charity, the accrued donations will be distributed to other organizations receiving donations.
This seems fair.
Why shouldn't Brave adopt this exact model?
Because if I donate to the EFF and it instead goes to a certain charity that kills something like 90% of the pets it takes in, I'm going to be upset.
If I donate to my favorite YouTube personality and instead the money goes to PewDiePie's empire, I'm going to be upset.
The difference between donations and taxes is that I can choose who to fund and how much. If that choice is no longer mine, and I have a strong chance to fund entities I find morally repulsive, then why donate?
But smile doesn't cost anything to the user. You pay the same checkout price for something you were already buying.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this is really the same thing.
First of all, Brave doesn't just sit idly by and wait for creators to seek them out; they attempt to contact creators via email to let them know there are funds available for them to claim.
Second, Brave is completely transparent about how the process works. They're not claiming to donors that the funds _will_ reach their intended destination and then not delivering. The method they use to deliver cash to creators is clearly explained on their website.
"Hey, we have money for you! All you need to do is send us your social security number, address and bank account information. This is legit, we promise we're not from Nigeria"
Yeah, sounds legit.
Yep, that's pretty shitty. I don't know what info brave asks for, but I have pretty tight PII requirements for services I use. If I think Braves terms are unreasonable, is there a reconciliation process I can undertake, or does brave just keep my readers tips? Shady as fuck.
I just finished the process. To verify a site, you upload a file to the site, or add a DNS record, and then you can access your BAT. I don't know how you can withdraw, though.
EDIT: Oh, wait, they make you register a wallet on a site called uphold.com, which will just send the tokens to your Ether wallet or convert them to another cryptocurrency or pay you to your bank. You do have to register for KYC after $1000 worth of income, they say.
not a lawyer, but I've heard elsewhere that this is indeed illegal
If I accept donations for ${Charity}, but then say "well they have to actually ask me for it before I send it to them ...", and in the meantime it sits in my bank account, I feel like that _would_ be somewhat unethical.
If the charity had to jump through hoops to receive the donations, yes. If the creators could just get a check in the mail, or BAT were converted to cash and forwarded to an existing patreon, I wouldn't have the same concerns that I do as is.
I'm not sure what you're expecting them to do. They already send creators an email telling them how to claim their money once the accumulated funds reach a significant amount. How is that any less convenient than a check in the mail?
Are you seriously asking about what is less convenient about getting a check in the mail that can be deposited at any bank account in the world vs getting an email explaining the hoops you need to jump through in order to create an account to get access to a BAT tokens which can then be turned into cash by creating another account at some shady crypto coin exchange?
There's no BAT to creator, they get paid in fiat via Uphold. Is it too much to at least read the docs before throwing stones?
When discussing a system that creates obligations for others, yes it is too much to ask that all users read the docs before throwing stones.
If you donate via this system, you've now created an obligation for me to read an email, look up the company, read their documentation, read reviews and scam reports to ensure that they're legitimate, provide them personal information, then repeat the process for a second site, and then I can get the money you've given me.
Yeah, I do think that's far, far too much.
Dang, it's people like you that are the reason we can't have nice things. I am pretty bearish on BAT's system myself, and I wouldn't use it personally, but it's your attitude toward this stuff that makes me not want to try to come up with ideas to help content creators or the "advertising problem" on the internet. Stuff like this is why advertising still exists and is unfortunately the superior choice still in monetization even though it is beyond shitty.
I think you're being unreasonably harsh here. You have to consider the perspective of the people you want to help. Lashing out at me for explaining why it's a difficult problem doesn't particularly help solve the problem.
Let me try again:
Think about how much spam you receive on a regular basis.
Now imagine you're in a position where you have fans wanting to send you money: you probably get all the bulk spam plus a ton of targeted spam simply for being notable. This goes double if you have a need for people to be able to message you legitimate business inquiries, because then you're going to get illegitimate inquiries as well.
Then imagine one of the messages in the flood (I know people with six figure unread message counts) that is your inbox said that they had some money available for you, and all you had to do was sign up for their service with your personal information.
You'd be crazy to be willing to do that without researching, likely for several hours.
And if more of these services start popping up, then you have to check up on each one individually as they come in.
That's not something most people in that position can afford to do for 0.01% of their inbox.
Or you could ignore them, but then you're at risk of upsetting your fans because they're trying to send you money and you're not receiving it, out of a quite reasonable assumption that it could be a scam. No one wins in that situation either.
Or, consider the following situation:
Someone you know recommends a donations platform, or you find one while searching, whatever.
You sign up for an account, post the link somewhere, and people use it.
It's much more inconvenient for the users who are giving the money and have to track down what platform you use, but at the same time they also get a level of assurance that any money they send will end up in your hands in the end.
> Lashing out at me for explaining why it's a difficult problem doesn't particularly help solve the problem.
You didn't originally explain why it was a difficult problem at all, all you did was insinuate that most people are too lazy to read documentation, made hyperbolic statements about the difficulty of claiming money, and seemed to suggest that therefore this specific project is a failure or something.
While this post is a bit better at clarifying your argument, the post you're responding to is still 100% in the right here. You may have thought you were helping with it, but the fact is that all most people like to do, is poke holes in reasonable solutions, just because they don't exactly match whatever specific criteria they had in mind. You have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's so easy to come up with criticisms, that even the people you're critiquing have probably thought of them already, much to everyone's astonishment probably. What's not easy, is coming up with any kind of alternatives or possible solutions to these holes, because if it were, they would've likely been implemented.
Believe it or not, all this does is demoralize people actively trying to solve the hard problems you claim to be trying to "help", thus hurting your own cause in the end, because there's no motivation to be gained by helping a bunch of entitled armchair know-it-alls. Despite what everybody may like to think, technological progress is fundamentally a people problem just as much as it is an actual technological problem.
EDIT: Just for full disclosure, as a cryptocurrency investor myself, I also am bearish on BAT. But that's just because I'm bearish on anything having to do with Etherium by default.
The original question was sarcastically asking whether reading the documentation was too much to ask, implying that laziness was the issue. I responded that for the target market, yes, it actually is too much to ask, and not because of laziness.
I didn't come in and say the whole thing was a bad idea and that it should be abandoned. Just that if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience. As well as pointing out that the idea of not requiring opt-in actually causes the friction that it seeks to avoid.
If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag. It's not always true, and it might not be true for all users, but it's something to seriously consider.
If people are worried that your product will appear to be a scam, you absolutely need to reconsider.
> If insight into the target audience's perspective is demoralizing, you honestly should stop and reconsider your priorities. I say that without any kind of sarcasm or criticism in my voice. If the people you want to help believe that the thing you're making will cause problems for them, that's a red flag.
I actually agree with this completely, but it's totally orthogonal to key points of the counter-arguments here. Some people thinking your project will cause them issues cannot be inherently bad, pretty much out of necessity, because you simply can never please everyone all the time. If it starts to become a sizable portion of your intended audience, maybe, but even then there will always be a sizable signal/noise ratio as well, which is the real issue here. It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
The problem here isn't one of digging up issues, as anybody that's managed any kind of non-trivial project knows they are plentiful, it's a problem with finding solutions. Therefore, the main counter-argument that's been made here is that simply shouting and pointing at these things is not going to help your case as an end user. It's a pretty straightforward point, but people seem to forget that all projects need to make trade-offs, and that often their contributions aren't totally novel "insights" that the project maintainers aren't aware of.
For example, you state:
> if the design requires more than a paragraph of explanation, then that's a serious problem for the target audience.
Which is true, but arguably anyone doing any kind of business would likely know that already. The trouble is actually coming up with such a short explanation, especially when as was claimed before, people don't like to read documentation. It's not exactly easy to explain Bitcoin in one paragraph, much less smart contracts, and even harder still to explain some etherium-based token, on top of explaining the business model and the reason behind it in such brevity. Which is why, even though I'm also not particularly in favor of this BAT project, I know I have nothing to contribute to it in terms of useful criticism because I acknowledge that it's a hard problem and that they're fighting an uphill battle anyway. The part that I am arguing against, is that many seem to implicitly believe that just pointing out that some project is fighting an uphill battle is enough of a worthy contribution to get their concerns addressed/acknowledged somehow.
The more concerning corollary to this, is not so much that these sorts of responses "discourage" active project developers anyway, but that they de-incentivize future projects from even attempting to bother with hard problems, just because they observe enough of a backlash against previous solutions that they deem the risk-to-reward ratio not worth it, instead of actively exploring the space, when that's exactly what's needed to gain any sort of traction on long-term hard problems.
We already see this happening, with so much manpower going towards developing relatively safe "problems" like scaling social networks and/or optimizing ad delivery mechanisms, instead of encouraging people to try out different/riskier things. And that's the real crux of the issue.
> It's not that people's concerns are unfounded, or that they should be ignored, it's that nothing is ever argued in favor of why this specific issue should be prioritized over all the other equally urgent issues in a project, nor more importantly, how this particular issue could be addressed.
1.) This issue should be prioritized because it makes the whole endeavor literally appear to be a scam to the exact people it wants to help by sending them money.
2.) It should be addressed by being opt in.
Both of which I did cover in my previous posts.
I get where you're coming from. But this is actionable advice with a very strong reason why it should be prioritized.
No obligation.
In the screenshot of the content creator dashboard, it looks like there is a dropdown menu (BAT to [dropdown]). Can't the creator choose "BAT" in the dropdown and receive BAT (or fiat, or whatever else they like that Uphold supports)?
What makes you think you necessarily need a separate account at an exchange? Theoretically Brave could offer to pay you via pretty much any method you want. (Direct deposit, Paypal, Bitcoin, BAT, or yes, even a check in the mail if you prefer.) They just need a way to verify that they're sending the money to the right person; it's not like they already have your address.
Randomly accepting money from strangers is a bit of a compliance nightmare. You don’t want to chair a charity that winds up having received donations from sanctioned persons.
What if they can't verify? Do they return unclaimed money to sender? To state?
Oh, I have read emails promising me free money before! Are you saying those might have actually been legit, and that they should not have automatically gone to my spam bucket?
If they were from Brave, then maybe so.
But yeah, I find it pretty hilarious how much like a scam those emails are going to sound, despite being legit.
Is Brave going to mail me a cheque if i don't sign up for their creators platform?
This isn't analogous to collecting donations for a charity and then making a bulk donation. It's analagous to collecting donations for a charity, taking a cut of those donations for your troubles, and then depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
We're not taking donations, and there's no requirement the recipient be a charity. This is a user-driven contribution system, users decide to opt in, hold custody of tokens, and let browsing automation + any manual pinning or adjusting the like drive the tokens to creators.
If creators don't register after a decently long interval, the tokens flow back to the user growth pool. Users may choose to support only verified creators/publishers. As we scale up this user growth pool "powerball" effect goes away, and the BAT becomes more dear vs. fiat, so the pool lasts longer as grants and matching scale down in token quantity per user.
> and then depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
and then not depositing those donations in your bank account until the charity you supposedly collected for comes and asks for them.
Probably a typo :)
Is it unethical to buy someone a gift card? That’s another way of looking at this.
No, and that analogy doesn't make sense. Presumably if you bought a gift card for someone you would... give it to them directly. This is someone who says "You need presents for your friends. I will sell you gift cards to their favorite stores! But you can't take the cards and give them to the friends. Instead, I'll hold onto them until your friends come and establish a business relationship with me."
No, you should be asking "is it unethical to ask for donations on behalf of an unaware 3rd party and not send the money unless the 3rd party proactively contacts you and requests it"
But you get the gift card when you buy it. You can then give it to another person. The thing of value is in your possession the entire time.
Funny you say that. This makes me think of gift cards in the sense that I suspect they will have thousands of tiny balances that are never redeemed. Usually you lose any balance after X years.
They do have thousands of tiny balances that are never redeemed and that's exactly why places are now issuing gift cards for rebates and such. That balance you don't use usually goes right back to them.
well, who's problem is that? why didn't you get it out! its like saying, I left my wallet on a park bench, and that was like years ago! now it's gone! wallets are dumb.
I'm going to be very happy when this approach succeeds. Try taking off your Google goggles.
This isn't really a constructive comment. I don't think that my being at google or not affects my ability to judge how ethically sketchy another product is.
Would it be equally unethical to use your position as a defacto monopoly to sell advertising? Let’s not mention ethics about other people considering your employer.
Also as it's since been revealed, if you don't register within 90 days of accruing $100, Brave claims that money to devote to "user growth", iow, marketing for Brave itself. So it really is chucking money into a hole, even more than with those other options.
That seems possibly illegal. :-/
If the company distributes contributions based on the time spent viewing material, then it's just tossing small bits of money into lots of buckets as users watch videos.
You need to ensure a 100% signup by video creators to ensure every creator gets paid and no money is in a hole. That's simply not possible; many creators are probably dead, unable to access their accounts, or unwilling to sign up for this service.
In that case, a very significant chunk of cash would be collected and never distributed. Relying on 100% adoption by creators to ensure no funds are miscredited is a miserable user experience.
The money doesn't go "into a hole". The funds are saved and a creator can retrieve them at any time once they sign up for an account
Why not make it a "pledge?"
I think many users would like to worry at least a bit about "is that money I'm sending actually getting to guy/gal I want to have it" - I hope that's transparent to them. I'd hate for my small donations to create more paperwork than necessary.
Is that sufficiently clear to the “donor”? Because it sounds like they’re telling the viewers that the their money and voice can reach the content owner via this unrelated third party that has no intention of doing so. That’s clearly unethical
And who gets to hold that money in an interest bearing account until the recipient registers? What if they never register?
And what if the content creator doesn't want/never wanted to give their details to Brave?
Will you ever refund the money, say if its not claimed in a certain amount of time, or if the content creator hypothetically tells you to go jump?
>a creator can retrieve them at any time
at any time, up until the policy changes. Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favourite creators support only if they are unworried about whether their money actually gets to those creators.
> This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.
This comment reminds me of mp3sparks / allofmp3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllOfMP3 , saying they're on the up and up, content creators just have to ask them for their royalties.
Fair point. Brave's system is still better than just blocking all ads without offering an alternate funding mechanism for creators though; and people seem to have no problem with browser extensions that do that.
Its not better, theres a middle man collecting money, same reason no one likes AdBlockers acceptable ad extortion scam.
Yeah, seems pretty sketchy, more or less like sending money via PayPal to random email addresses in the hope that the owner checks it for money. I respect Brave for trying, but accepting money from consumers and holding it until creators sign up to receive it is not good enough.
That in large part is how Paypal got started. You would get an email that said: "You were just paid $25, click here to get your money." and you'd signup for Paypal.
No there was a big difference. Paypal was a referral system and the money came out of Paypal's pocket not the user sending the referral. So if the user never redeemed it was no loss to paypal.
Brave could return the payment if it’s not collected after some time.
Except they won't:
"Where does my contribution go if a publisher/website is not part of this program yet?
When there is about $100.00 USD in BAT for a specific publisher, from all contributors, Brave makes three attempts to complete the publisher verification process. We will hold unclaimed funds for a minimum of 90 days, after which it will be added to the UGP (User Growth Pool)."
https://brave.com/faq-payments/#formal-terms-conditions
That’s pretty toxic if you ask me. They’re monetizing others’ content for their user growth.
I'm now collecting for every charity in existence even though I don't have a relationship with any of them. All they have to do is contact me to retrieve the funds.
I have a bot that creates a new meta-charity every 3 seconds which does the same.
for disclosure, I also used to work at YouTube.
revshare is complicated and governed by, among other factors, deals YouTube makes with various parties. Brave doesn't have access to any of that information, so they couldn't possibly know how to split revenue between the uploader of the video and all the other parties that might have content embedded in the video, even if it were their intention to do so.
As a consumer, the direct relationship between me and the content creator is much more important to me than those other issues. Those "other parties" other issues are actually between the various content creators, sponsors, and platform providers, and aren't really my problem. I'm quite tired of those other parties interposing themselves into my relationship with creators.
Right, but as a consumer, you don't have to deal with the ramifications of the other parties failing to be paid, a scenario which generally results in the content creator having their content pulled for incorrect / unauthorized (re-)use.
Right, but as a consumer, you don't have to deal with the ramifications of the other parties failing to be paid
Such issues came up in the old days, but they were settled without interposing themselves directly in my life. Back in the 90's, my music collection didn't start partially disappearing because of these things.
Why would they split anything with youtube sponsers or care about deals they are not a party to. That's youtube's business. In those cases the content creator is paid by two parties.
I think the issue is with collab videos (multiple parties) for which creators can setup a sharing agreement.
In such a video every currency unit inside youtube (Ads, Red, ...) can be split up automatically according to some per-video sharing agreement. Everything that comes through Brave has a single recipient, the channel operator (because Brave can't read this contract).
Not being able to donate money to someone that has no way of receiving that money seems sketch, but letting money rest in the account of a third-party that has no affiliation with the receiver is fine?
As far as I can tell, Brave is doing both. The money rests in a third party account that has no affiliation with the receiver, and they have no way of getting to it until they register.
To put it succinctly, I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.
(whereas yeah, I don't consider holding money in escrow unethical)
I believe that they meant YouTube allowing you donate without a receiving account is sketchy compared to Patreon, but their sentence placement/spacing was poor an obfuscated their point.
Bitcointip was taken over by Changetip. I believe you can recover your balance at https://changetip.com
The most important thing to come out of this. Thanks for the tip!
You're most welcome!
It does give whoever holds the funds a good deal of float from which they can earn interest. Which is why I have a feeling this has the potential to become the norm.
And who are not regulated like a bank.
Final Tweet: "Ooops we invested all your money. Now it's gone. :("
Does this provide an end around content creators who get demonetized, sometimes for arguably good reasons, other times seemingly political reasons?
what's more Brave cuts off the monetization the channels are getting in USD from YT ads. Not good for YT channels, and unclear how it is good for the user other than "hey we figured out a way to cheat the system so you don't have to watch ads!"
Throwing money into a hole is pretty much how the BMI/ASCAP music scheme works for artists who aren't part of their protection racket.
Patreon is worse at this point because they have already demonstrated they will seize and/or not distribute funds to accounts they dislike. That's one step above Paypal levels of horrible business practices.
It incentivizes people to use it, though. This is how Bitcoin gained adoption in the early days, too.
As for the "thrown away money", that's people's business if they want to do it with a relative chance of the author gaining that money.
isn't that how paypal worked/works?
Hey, better than ads.
Too bad content creators put ads directly into the videos.
peep the google shill. kys libturd.
Don’t worry brave handle that’s case with a refund.
I just tried this after reading the article here, both on the producer side and on the consumer side.
On the producer side, I registered my site by adding a file to the .well-known directory, and that's it. I can now receive BAT or just USD/EUR to my bank via some service called Uphold.
On the consumer side, it's nice, you top up to your browser directly (so no third-party wallets or anyone to know what you visited, hopefully) and it distributes the money you set per month to the sites you visited, based on the number of visits. I bought some BAT and can definitely see myself using this, if it were not for having to completely switch browsers (I use Firefox and plan to keep doing that).
Overall, good job to the Brave team, the system seems very well-thought-out (I'm not sure about how privacy is handled, but hopefully no third party will know the sites I visited, even though I guess the Ethereum ledger is public and someone could surmise this). Too bad it requires me to switch browsers to use.
EDIT: One problem I saw is with Uphold, which quotes me 51,000 BAT/BTC (and "no hidden fees"!) and then, as soon as I sent the money to buy the BAT, the "activity" page quotes 47,000 BAT/BTC. So much for no fees.
EDIT 2: And now it charges me an extra $4 to withdraw, screw that. I'm not going to spend a load of money on fees so I can spend money on content, so creators can pay more fees.
EDIT 3: And it doesn't even let me withdraw (the "confirm" button stays disabled). Also, I have special hate for forms that say "amount to withdraw", include no fees in that, give you no "all" option and make you guess twenty times which amount will withdraw the closest thing to all your money, while the fee keeps changing every five seconds because of fluctuations. Screw everything about this.
Isn't it due to price fluctuations?
No, the "add funds" page still says 51,000. Hell, 52,000 now.
That's the spread.
The "add funds" page literally quotes the mid-market price that you're going to receive when you buy coins, and then gives you fewer coins.
Yeah this isn't going to fly with Youtube itself, they're not going to host ad-free videos so that a 3rd party can take their nontrivial portion of the ad revenue.
Schemes like this are nice, but don't forget who pays for hosting, serving and promoting the content.
I think you might be misunderstanding how it works. Its essentially Patreon. Will it work? Who knows. Can youtube stop it from happening? Probably not any more than they can stop Patreon.
I'm sure YT can't (and probably wouldn't particularly want to) stop the monetization scheme, but the ad-blocking is going to interfere with the main-line business model that gets content creators paid, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's push-back on that (probably in the form of client-server verification the ad has been seen that leads to a good old-fashioned measure / countermeasure arms race to ensure the ads are served if the video is served---after all, how do you snip out the ads if they're baked into the video itself, for starters?).
a straightforward solution would be for YT to have some sort of revenue share bundled in for this feature. "Use our service, we take 5% for hosting/discovery". Basically what Patreon does.
But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt?
Still my understanding is that Patreon doesn't automatically allow people to view YT videos ad free. Sure people get donations and the amount of donations drive the number of videos etc but they don't go into YT's territory.
> But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt?
Patreon censors conservatives off their platform. [Context if you don't know what I'm talking about -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw]
To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.
Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.
I may be misunderstanding something, since I'm not a youtube creator, but couldn't someone sufficiently comfortable with the other revenue streams they have at their disposal voluntarily choose to demonetize their own youtube videos?
For now, yes. But what people are saying is that if large numbers of YouTube content creators turn off ads and switch to getting their monetary support through Brave, Patreon, or some other income stream that YouTube doesn't profit from, there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to make video ads mandatory.
> there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to make video ads mandatory.
Ideally in that scenario, competition would push creators and viewers onto some other platform.
Not sure how realistic that is, given the network effects involved with YouTube.
Yes, Jim Sterling's videos are deliberately demonetized, his revenue comes via Patreon.
Agreed. I think it might come down to the entirety of the BAT ecosystem (ad blocking browser, optional ads that you earn $ for turning on, micro donation system in the spirit of patreon). I certainly think its worth watching to see how it unfolds at least.
Brave also blocks ads. I would think youtube have a better chance at suing them.
Are ad-blocking services generally sued by ad-displaying websites? I've never heard of that happening, but I could certainly be wrong.
Not generally, but it has happened. And the Brave business model of "block ads, then show our own ads instead" combined with this type of advertising is probably a clearer target than "some guy making uBlock for free".
I don't know about uBlock Origin (which is what you probably meant) but according to press articles AdBlock Plus gets paid money by Google to not block their ads, which feels at least in the ballpark to what Brave is trying to do.
The company behind Adblock plus also has been involved in lawsuits about their product (they won, so far)
And what's to stop someone from creating a BATS blocker that simulates attention? Will there be a captcha like challenge?
Ad-blockers not. But Brave profits by replacing website ads with its own ads.
There have been attempts; they haven't succeeded.
You really think a jury is going to buy this?
Imagine this for a moment: the Brave browser ships with a VR headset that automatically descends upon the user's eyes and ears for the duration of an ad, shielding them from their own screen (and thus the Youtube ad playing on it) and playing a different ad (or no ad) instead.
Does the same liability still apply?
I think that Brave lawyers will have an easy time convincing a jury that a merely drawing the user's attention to a different piece of content is not tantamount to damages to some website that happens to be among those open in their browser at the time.
I think it's very closely related to Patreon. But a distinction that they are presumably hoping adds value is fine grained association of payments with how much content is being consumed.
True, but it also means that Youtube might not have a future.
Arguably, they already don't have a future.
Ad free? Same ads on youtube but on some other site you can tip someone based youtube channel id.
Would be interesting if they only offered this on the (growing number of) demonetized / unmonetizeable YouTube videos.
>so that a 3rd party can take their nontrivial portion of the ad revenue
The ad revenue is not the money at play here.
Not directly. But I think the (theoretical) ability to monetize videos in other ways unsticks creators from dependence on the youtube-controlled ad revenue mechanism.
Some youtubers are already incorporating podcast ads (Blue Apron, Naturebox, etc) into their videos. So while I'm dubious of any particular coin trying to add its own monetization layer on top of youtube, I think it's a special case of a general phenomenon that bears monitoring.
> Some youtubers are already incorporating podcast ads
I don't see what you mean by saying these are podcast ads?
I think they mean that there's a set of companies that advertises a lot in various podcasts, and now ads for the same companies, in similar style, are in YouTube videos as well.
(E.g. if you are into photography or related areas, you're going to find Squarespace ads all over the place)
I don't care what you are into, you are going to find squarespace ads all over the place.
From their contributor terms of service on the BAT website[0]:
"For each website receiving votes during a Calculation Period that is not a Brave Publisher by the end of that Calculation Period, the BAT corresponding to its votes will not be distributed at the end of that Calculation Period, and will instead be held in an Uphold omnibus wallet for no less than ninety (90) days thereafter. At that time, the undistributed BAT may be sent to Company’s user growth pool, which is a pool of BAT that Company administers to incentivize use of the Platform (as described more fully in Exhibit B of the BAT Terms of Sale, available at https://basicattentiontoken.org/terms-and-conditions/). But if the website receiving votes becomes a registered Brave Publisher before the corresponding BAT is sent to the user growth pool, that website will receive such BAT as Publisher Contributions in the first Calculation Period following its registration."
So if you donate money to a content creator that hasn't signed up to be a Brave publisher (and in doing so, agreed to Uphold's ToS), your donation will go to the "User Growth Pool". From their regular ToS:
"Once the User Growth Fund is exhausted, it will be discontinued, and no new BAT will be created for or transferred to the User Growth Fund"
So who knows where your donations will go if the content creator doesn't sign up to receive them.
[0] https://basicattentiontoken.org/contributor-terms-of-service...
Lots of people here pointing out minor, easily fixable nitpicks here, completely fail to understand how bad the ad/monetization/content world has gotten. Ad fraud is still an insanely huge problem that companies like Twitch and Youtube constantly wrestle with (former Twitch employee here). Monetization policies are still arcane, unfair, and increasingly untenable for many content producers on Youtube (google "Youtube monetization drama" if you really don't know).
The whole idea that you can pay creators instead of watching ads is obviously a good one, and this is really the best attempt so far at actually solving the problem. Someone suggested implementing this as a chrome extension -- Really? They took an ambitious route with building their own browser, but that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and monetization work on the internet, which if you haven't paid attention, is currently destroying everything good about the Web and eating away at the values of civic society (again, see recent congressional hearings on Russian Manipulation if you've missed the news)
(Disclosure: I hold a small amount of BAT, but mostly discouraged by the finnicky nature of some of these comments that want Everything to be Perfect Overnight without realizing the scale of the problem that Brave/BAT are trying to accomplish)
Edit: If you want more reading on the subject of how screwed the digital content monetization industry is, this link is also sitting on Hacker News a couple stories below this one.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-c...
> that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and monetization work on the internet
Why? This doesn't seem obvious to me at all.
In fact, I'd argue the opposite. Depending on users installing and using an entirely different browser just so they can get one feature that could easily be implemented as a browser extension is likely to be a serious obstacle to that goal.
Well. It would a while to explain the business and technological fundamentals if you don’t already understand them. Check out their whitepaper (https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...) for their long-term vision and truly ask youself if this is implementable as a browser extension.
Browsers need disruption anyway — chrome is increasingly buggy and slow, and I trust “the person who literally invented browsers, javascript, and the modern internet” to write another one.
Wow. Brendan Eich didn't "invent browsers" or the modern freaking internet.
Okay, fine, that’s slightly exagerrated. A key pioneer of the early web, inventor of Javascript, grandfather of the open web movement, and somebody working diligently on core web intrarstructure for over 20 years. That better?
“Father” - I’m not that old.
Brave uses Blink, the same engine as chrome. How disruptive is that?
Startups should do things in order. I’m sure better engines are in the pipeline, but you can’t do everything overnight.
> Startups should do things in order.
It's a browser company. What do you mean, "order", do they have other priorities other than creating a browser?
Creating a browser engine from scratch is no easy task. Knowing this, why not use a quality browser such as Chromium as a base and build on it? Their goal and priority are to change the advertising and monetization of the web, not build another engine that would take years and millions of dollars to make.
All the other stuff they're working on that's more important than creating a new engine.
Is the "ad-free YouTube video experience" something that violates some Google user agreement? Just thinking that Brave is a high profile project and not a tool you download.
I'm surprised YouTube doesn't just block the Brave browser entirely. The entire business model of Brave is "siphon off some of the ad revenue from websites".
During an anti-trust investigation by a governmental body that has punished large company before over abusing its browser monopoly?
Yeah, I don't think so.
Do you mean Microsoft or something else I might be missing? In Microsoft's case, they were punished for their OS monopoly being used to create a browser monopoly by making a default choice for the user, not for abusing its browser monopoly.
Blocking Brave for violating their usage agreements seems very much in another league, even though it might sound like they are building a browser monopoly via their video streaming monopoly. They are not in a position where they take the choice of defaults away from the user, and as long as Firefox, Safari and Edge have some market share, the user still has a choice of compliant browsers. Blocking Brave might be more akin to enforcing their ToS for Youtube via their Play store by blocking 3rd party apps with download function (which is prohibited in Youtube ToS).
I don't really see how a browser that blocks ads is any different from an extension that blocks ads.
Well, it blocks adds and collects money on the behalf of others without having permission to do so...
> blocks adds
Yes, but so does uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus, etc.
> collects money on the behalf of others
Why would they need permission from Google to do that? That's completely unrelated to them.
Because it's illegal. You write a book, I sell some home-printed copies of it and might give me some money if you claim it. It's clearly illegal.
> I sell some home-printed copies
That'd be a copyright violation. But Brave isn't making or selling copies of anything, so I don't see what your point is.
That's not what's happening, though. Brave is not running a streaming video service. They aren't hosting or distributing the content. There's nothing illegal about holding money and pledging to give it to someone if they ask for it (as long as you actually do).
That doesn't matter. Torrent websites don't host or distribute any content, yet they still get shut down. Not opposing you, just saying your argument isn't enough.
It does matter, because your argument categorically does not apply. Brave is not involved with the distribution of content.
And it's all done client side. What is the issue? Or does it bother Google and other online players that they can not control what is being done?
Whose permission does it need exactly?!
1) It blocks ads, just like a browser extension would
2) It has a set-up a payment content creators can take advantage of.
I fail to see what is wrong with either.
That doesn't make any sense. Right now, I'm going to start putting money into this jar to my left. I'm going to put a sticker on it that says your name. You can come retrieve this jar if you like. Therefore, I have done something wrong?
I think this is a service I'd use if it were available as an extension rather than a browser in its own right.
Here one item of the Brave-FAQ:
Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
=> give them feedback if you’re interested
> Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
I happen to be working on this right now http://browsercoin.com, if anybody is interested in beta testing it out, my email is in my profile.
> Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
Basically, their FAQ answer is debatable because the Chrome API is more than enough to support a Patreonesque model, if you have uBlock and other privacy focused extension, you don't even need to download a heavy browser client.
Hence the name BrowserCoin, I'd be open to feedbacks on what you would like to see happen with it.
I clicked; might want to update your site from the nginx welcome page.
> "I happen to be working on this right now"
Sounds like pwaai is literally working on browsercoin right now! :)
uh, "Welcome to nginx!" ...
They've confirmed that they will be building extensions for other browsers and expanding BAT beyond the Brave browser. The Brave browser is, of course, the first proving ground and lets them implement the full platform without API limitations, but they've confirmed that insofar as the extension APIs are supportive, they will make extensions.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
Maybe consider Flattr? From what I can tell it does basically the same thing: https://flattr.com/contributors
It does the same with much more overhead for the user as far as I can tell. The point of Brave is to have everything working behind the scene for the user, so no friction.
What's the "much more overhead"? As far as I know, in the current state of Brave you have to buy tokens, just like you put money in flattr. In the future model, Brave will show you ads vs flattr taking money directly - is that much more overhead?
(The implementations might differ in other important things, e.g. privacy or fee structure, but the basic user attention model seems similar enough to me)
Flattr _used_ to require the user to click a button to indicate they like a particular page and want to support its creator. I assume GP is simply unaware that that's not how Flattr works anymore.
Flattr 2.0 works more like Brave does; the user pays a monthly subscription, and Flattr just automatically distributes those funds to creators based on what sites the user views most often that month.
I stand corrected, I didn't know about this new version.
I don't think Flattr will succeed over cryptocurrencies such as BAT/STEEM.
And in another bonus doesn't appear to require tokens.
One attention-crypto as a browser extension is WildSpark by Synereo: https://wildspark.me
I have no affiliation, I have zero of whatever their coin is, but I randomly signed up for their mailing list a while back out curiosity.
You should really try the browser itself, partly because it will pay you to watch some ads, and partly because it will respect your privacy.
But I trust Mozilla more with my privacy and I don't want to watch ads at all!
This is why Brave has a limited future as it is.
You can't pay me cents to pick a worse browser. It's like the days when there were those pay to surf companies. The promise of money is nice, but most end users don't benefit that much from it. There's a lot more incentive for the company for their product to work than there is for the users to adopt it.
I'm not deeply familiar with Brave's roadmap but my understanding is that the BAT tokens you'd receive from watching ads could also be used to tip content providers similar to what can be done in Steemit.
Brave is open source, and built by a team of privacy focused, performance oriented pioneers of the web, founded by the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla.
https://www.brave.com/about/
> founded by the inventor of Javascript
So he is obviously capable of great evil
Great success! (must read in Borat's voice).
This, so much this. Maybe I could reconsider if they paid me more than a few dollars per good (according to me) advertisement, but I doubt that this will be the case. Until then, I will stick to ad-blocking.
How about this, a system will show you ads and you can chose to skip or stop if you don't like them. In any case for however many seconds you endured, you get paid.
Sounds interesting, but my threshold is probably too high, and I would skip most of them. When was the last time you enjoyed watching an ad? I can't remember, but it's rarely the case. If you combine this with the chance that you are the target of the ads, it's pretty low.
I've invested in BAT during their ICO and today I feel like I'm hustling my investment a little bit. :-)
I mostly use Brave on my phone because it makes the browsing experience faster and removes most ads by default. I won't change to another browser on the iPhone anytime soon. Having said this, I haven't used the payments feature outside of web3 (Ethereum DApps).
I don't watch ads with any interest or attention in general, but I often have Youtube playing some live concert on the background while I work and ads cut midway forcing me to change tabs so I can skip them. The idea that instead of breaking my concentration to stop an add playing I can simply let them and that _that_ could be a little money generating activity seems appealing.
(edit a word)
Safari with content blockers does this as well.. perhaps with better performance?
I don't want to watch any ads. Anywhere, ever.
How is that a choice if it shows ads by default? By the time you skip the ad, it already broke the flow of the content.
I was comparing different browsers.
I don't think you have a good understanding of BAT. They are aiming for high quality ads that aren't spammy. The ads will be displayed in something like a private ad tab, and won't be put in in-page slots. So, if you don't want to look at the private ad tab, then it's logically equivalent to not seeing ads. If you want to and be compensated for it, then the option is there. What's wrong with having more options?
Secondly, Brendan Eich already confirmed that there is a 70% revenue share for users. Let's pretend the advertiser is paying 10 cents per view, then you would get 7 cents per ad watched. 70% is a lot.
Thirdly, even if it's just a few cents, it's better than nothing. Things build up over time. Before you know it, you'll have a few $. That's awesome. You can get a month of subscription on a ton of websites for like $3. That's also 3 songs on iTunes store, or a paid app on the app store.
They've confirmed that they will be building extensions for other browsers and expanding BAT beyond the Brave browser. The Brave browser is, of course, the first proving ground and lets them implement the full platform without API limitations, but they've confirmed that insofar as the extension APIs are supportive, they will make extensions.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself. Chromne API gives access to browser history, and making a BAT wallet is pretty easy.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
"The Brave browser provides an ad-free YouTube video experience. It also enables a direct monetary relationship between the content creator and their audience."
Is Google party to this? And if not, how is this sustainable model?
Honestly I hadn't looked into this browser previously, but I don't understand what their value proposition is, beyond handwavey promises that crypto-currency utility tokens and some future machine-learning developments can get around the ad fraud problem.
But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.
> But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.
...why not? Subversion of Youtube's advertising and revenue flow sounds like a prospect which enjoys high demand and low supply at the moment.
Google kicked the Echo off of YouTube for TOS violations. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/youtube-is-no-longer...
I mean, you might then argue that the Echo (and, for that matter, Amazon generally) was insufficiently surreptitious about it. If Brave can be more difficult to distinguish, it will also be more difficult to ban.
No, you might then argue that. :) Look how Uber’s behavior with paging and canceling Lyft rides during their poaching days came back to bite them in the ass. And I’m sure if Amazon’s small army of lawyers felt they had a leg to stand on with the UserAgent obfuscation route, they would do it.
Because Google will not allow it if it starts impacting their revenue significantly.
I may be wrong about this, but I don't think the Brave browser intends to allow google to stop them. That's kinda the point of making it a different browser.
> "subverting YouTube's advertising and revenue flow and replacing it with their own"
This is exactly what Patreon does. Pretty smart, honestly.
What is the technical advantage of Brave using a new token like BAT instead of directly using an existing cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that millions of people already hold, and will likely be less volatile in the long term?
I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no advtange to users.
See https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/862022787640082432 (from before our token sale).
We floated a User Growth Pool (UGP) of 300M tokens + 60M+ in reserve, created by fiat. These tokens were created before the sale and not sold. They're fungible, indistinguishable from other BAT created pre-sale for lockup to team & advisors, and from the one billion BAT sold on 5/31.
This idea was inspired by social credit currency, issued to citizens to endow them with funds. It can't be done with existing cryptocurrencies unless someone rich does it out of charity. The UGP has notional value between $40M and $110M. No moneybags in sight was volunteering to donate that much BTC or ETH to us.
We had two goals with the sale: endow the UGP, and fund the project. BAT is an ERC20 token so has many decimal places of fractional precision. As we grow, gain users who contribute starting from $0 cost to the user (via grants from the UGP, and even matching contributions for some months), prototype and ship user-paying private ads, and add other apps, BAT should become more valuable and our initial and matching grants can reduce to keep about the same value in USD or other fiats ($5 for initial grant, still working out matching details).
Hope this helps. We're playing the long game here. If the ecosystem expands and Ethereum solves scaling and anonymity on-chain, we will have the only decentralized, user-first and user-private/ZKP-anonymous funding model for the Web.
Here's a pie chart of token holders, where you can see the UGP+reserves, Bittrex (an exchange with BAT held for liquidity provisioning), the team+advisor lockup, and smaller accounts:
https://etherscan.io/token/tokenholderchart/0x0d8775f6484306...
I don't see a technical advantage either.
But I wouldn't say there's no advantage to users-- an ICO can let the founders (a) raise funds, and (b) give them a financial incentive for the project to succeed.
So in theory, ICOs can help users win because they can lead to great products that otherwise wouldn't exist. (That said, a lot of teams/projects are total junk.)
That might be true in some cases (Brendan Eich, though?) but making your product more complex for the user just to raise easy money seems like a poor trade-off.
On top of that many ICOs seem to have unjustified valuations and reduced oversight from investors vs traditional fundraising.
Wouldn't it be ironic if an ad-blocking browser such as Brave gained popularity with most YouTubers because of Google's self-inflicting YouTube "ad-pocalypse"?
I think it would be sweet poetry.
Genuinely asking: how is youtube supposed to pay for their own expenses when everyone uses brave and depletes their revenue stream? Won't that kill the platform itself?
Addressing the root cause of why people are leaving the platform would be a good step.
That is the problem of Google, who cares how they pay their bills? Also, if they really wanted, they could block people using Ad/Ublock on their site, but they don't. Why do you care about a multibillion dollar corp? I sure don't.
> who cares how they pay their bills?
People having that attitude towards content creators is how we landed in this mess in the first place.
I'd just like to point out that GP didn't directly present that attitude toward the content creators - just the host/provider, which is quite a different thing.
Nice, but "discovery" is still handled by YouTube, and this is one of the most important factors that determine the income of any given creator.
What we desperately need is a discovery system that is both fair and useful.
One step at a time...
Replacing ads on the client side is normally associated with the scummiest of malware. I'm not sure how Brave has maintained even a vaguely positive reputation.
I think your statement is overbroad in the sense that adblocking is also replacing ads, in that case with empty whitespace but replacing nonetheless. Brave allows users to put something else in the whitespace.
Brave is putting the ads shown (and more importantly reigning in the out of control user tracking and privacy invading bullshit) in the hands of the user.
A side bonus is $ collected and available to content producers and website owners.
If Brave weren't crystal clear about all -- if they marketed themselves as purely an adblocker, for example -- then I think you'd have a point. As it is, it's simply adblocking with a twist.
We don’t do that, and won’t in publisher owned inventory (ad space) without the publisher as partner.
Because Blockchain.
The whole thing where they collect money on behalf of someone who may not have an account and may be completely unaware of it seems unethical. It reminded me of a similar snafu with a project called tip4commit, which allows users to give bitcoin to projects they like. It also collected the money for any project on github, without an opt-in (or even an opt-out) mechanism for the project maintainers. Here's the issue where a lot of this got brought up: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127
I never watch youtube videos except for instruction videos and music videos. Why does google insist on going ads only rather than ALSO OFFERING pay per view?
I have the exact same gripe with facebook—their only viable method of supporting content is itself ruining the site. Both companies are just leaving money on the floor by committing entirely to a single (dying) revenue model.
This looks cool, but seems inherently untenable at actually getting the money to the content provider without the content provider working with this service.
Are you not aware of Youtube Red?
Speaking of Youtube Red, the way they handle if you have multiple devices is just so amazingly bad.
I pay for YouTube Red so that I can play music videos on my tv all day without ads. But if I go to a video on my desktop it will stop the playing of the video on the TV as only 1 session can be had with youtube at once IF YOU PAY FOR RED. If I dropped red, and just used ad blockers I will still be available to have multiple video sessions at once.
Drives me up a while and im seriously considering dropping red.
This is good to know, an interesting contrast to YouTube TV advertising support for 6-ish account sharing out of the box.
Maybe it'd be worth paying for a separate account for the TV.
US only.
Not strictly US only, but very limited availability, yes. There were some rumors it'd launch in parts of Europe this year, but that hasn't happened.
That seems like Youtube is leaving a lot of money on the table, though I don't understand the issues behind not offering outside the USA.
Why? Because of property right laws, local taxes, etc. It is very, very complicated to build such a system for every market in the world.
"It then displays it in the Brave Payments list, enabling the user to donate back on a monthly" ... So this will block ads on Youtube, and the creators will be compensated on donations? Does someone have a case-study on content/Youtube creators potentially making a living of donations? This seems like a bad business model: make creative videos and expect people to donate so you can feed yourself.
Creator produces content. I pay creator for content. Did you just suggest that the most traditional, direct business model ever created, value for value, is a "bad" one?
There are really only a couple problems: consumers have become accustomed to freeloading, and that there's no system in place to enable micropayments for content. Once we figure out a way to enable paying, let's say, $0.01 to watch a video or read a news article, the web will fundamentally change in a positive way.
> Creator produces content. I pay creator for content. Did you just suggest that the most traditional, direct business model ever created, value for value, is a "bad" one?
It isn't "value for value", it's a donation. The most traditional, direct business model ever created involves you not having the content until you pay.
More precisely, a donation is voluntary, whereas in the direct business model payment is mandatory. Before or after, is just a contractual thing :)
Someone needs to re-read the penny gap.
People HATE being nickel and dimed. Exactly zero people want to have to think to themselves "is this news article worth 5 cents?" every time they load a web page.
Right, which is why patreon works, and 10c per pageview doesn't.
But do they hate it less than ads?
If you pay for mobile service per GB then you already have this problem.
"Value for value" is fine; but the value of watching a video or reading an article is usually about zero to me, something I could easily do without, something that might even carry a negative value since it takes up my time. In fact, since it usually benefits the maker to have more viewers, maybe they should try paying me to watch.
"Consumers" (a problematic term) need a refrigerator to keep food cold, figuratively speaking. They don't need "content." If money is what people care about, they should get into the refrigerator business. (In China, since that's where it is now.)
The web isn't a money machine. If everybody who wanted to get paid for it, got the hell off it or was starved off it, that also would lead to the positive fundamental change of which you speak. Just sayin'.
> Does someone have a case-study on content/Youtube creators potentially making a living of donations?
https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt - 9,890 patrons - $36,214 per months in donations.
https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey - 7,719 patrons - $19,439 per video in donations.
Edit: And there's https://www.patreon.com/DeFranco at 14,268 patrons. His revenue is hidden but that's at least around 60k/month if not more.
These are (currently) just the really exceptional cases though. Youtube is building far more monetary value on the whole through ads.
Here's a more complete view: https://graphtreon.com/
Median income in the US is ~$42,000/yr last I knew. Call it $4K to make up a bit for benefits and such. There isn't a hard-and-fast way to count because some people hide their total, but there are clearly plural hundreds of people above that line in the top 1000 [1]. There's several more hundred people making poverty-line in most of the US (which as a relative measure, I can't do a precise cut off), and before one starts moralizing about how horrible that is, remember that they are not necessarily doing this as their only job. What may not be enough to live on can still be a very very nicely paying hobby.
You are certainly correct that overall, more money flows through YouTube. I am much less convinced that that's a good thing in general, though. The incentives on YouTube fluctuate a lot, but in general tend to support quantity over quality. In fact as I think about it, I wonder if Patreon is helping prop up YouTube a bit by helping the quality producers resist that; if YouTube banned alternate monetization and tried to survive just on their own quantity-over-quality metrics I wouldn't be surprised they would eventually experience an eat-your-own-seed-corn collapse. I've listened to the YouTube videos of a couple of the people chasing the quantity-over-quality treadmill that YouTube ends up putting them on to stay on top, and it's not a life I'd want or wish on anyone.
[1]: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators
Many of them are businesses >> 1 person, and they're not all video. There's no doubt some successful video creators on patreon, but it's still a pretty small number.
Plenty of the video-based ones are in erotic media, too. It's definitely a new and interesting income medium for that genre.
AvE has just shy of 12k patrons. https://www.patreon.com/AvE
He doesn't list a dollar amount but my guess is that it's at least $20k a month.
Patreon is really cool. Thanks for sharing.
All these people seem to make YouTube videos, so it looks like they are just cutting out the middleman (Patreon).
Jordan Peterson was making $60,000/mo (before he hid the donation totals) on Patreon [0]. Obviously it's a steep curve at the top but the big youtubers make good money with that model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson#Other_projects
This is not super wide-spread but it's more popular than you think. In addition to a bunch of Patreon-backed people, there's the Erfworld webcomic getting almost $2k per full-page update https://login.erfworld.com/toolshed and Sluggy Freelance with 442 subscribers https://login.sluggy.com/defenders
These business models (Patreon, Twitch subscriptions) have been robustly tested over the last 5 - 10 years, and many people make a living off of it. Are you unaware about these sites and how much money they make? The top Twitch streamers have around 15k subscribers, each at $5 / month, about half of which goes directly to the creator. Do the math and consider switching your career, haha.
Have you seen the industry of livestreaming? That's basically it. I'm not saying it's a good business model but people are making a ridiculous amount of money from it.
Coincidentally, I was just looking at MetaMask which links to Brave. Can someone explain LI5YO how they're related? I understand MetaMask is a browser extension to access distributed transactional content on Ethereum. Not sure how Brave monetisation relates to that.
We support MetaMask, as a chromium extension. It's really for developers and power users of Ethereum, not part of our BAT platform.
What happens when the receiver can not (or will not due to legal issues etc) create a Brave account to retrieve the donation? It's lost forever? Will the donator know if their donation was actually accepted or not and if not, can they get their donation back?
Would I technically owe taxes on tokens received even if I'm never notified of having received them?
Yes, I understand that if it's not reported it's unlikely anyone will be caught, but by the letter of the law does receiving a token mean I've received income?
If you haven't signed up, you owe about as much taxes as you would if I put your name on an envelope with $5 inside it and placed in my desk drawer.
Interesting list of people on the about page. Marshall Rose for example.
This won't block ads people put in their videos. It has to be youtube that could enforce that.
Cool, but how do you get users to install it?
Isn't this basically the same as flattr?
The screenshot shows their staging site: https://publishers-staging.basicattentiontoken.org/publisher...
https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attentio...