Brave Rewards offers two programs : one for publishers and another one which shares the publisher ad revenue with end users.
Reading the official Brave Telegram group, I notice that the questions are mostly about Brave ad payouts, BAT grants and anything else related to the Rewards program. (It’s natural that users would be interested in the financial aspect of the Brave Project.)
But Brave is not just an ERC20 token that gets distributed when you view certain ads. It’s also not just a way for publishers to get paid for attention spent on their content.
It’s a lot bigger than that.
Brave Rewards is all about the decentralization of content-generated revenue.
The concept of “attention” was designed to be abstract on purpose. What’s attention, really? Is it viewing time? Number of views? Clicks?
It’s not just clicks, it’s not time on page, it’s not views, it’s all of those things and much more!
People should get rewarded for their attention span – people should get rewarded for their time.
Existing ad networks reward neither users or publishers for their time.
If someone spends 30 minutes at a website and does not click ads, chances are the content creator will only get paid a minimal CPM commission, if any. Something in the tenths of pennies range.
That’s not fair, because those 30 minutes spent at the site have value both for the consumer and the content producer.
Time spent on media channels is valuable, but current advertising models do not reward content producers accordingly.
Brave does.
Similarly, if a user spends 30 minutes research a given topic, they should get rewarded for that attention span and for generating value for the publisher.
That’s why, during a visit, users see quality ads in Brave browser.
Brave ads are decentralized, not tracked, anonymous and displayed with limited rate of maximum 5 ads per hour (one every 12 minutes max). The user can also choose to see less ads if they want to or even turn off ad serving altogether.
Brave puts the user in control when it comes to privacy.
All existing ad networks track users, record their personal info, identify them if they’re logged into specific services (e.g. Facebook, Google) and keeps complete control of online user activity. Brave doesn’t.
This might sound a little controversial, especially to BAT investors (myself included), but it’s how Brave was designed.
The Brave model is currency agnostic.
You could use any decentralized cryptocurrency to reward publishers and users for their time. In fact some early versions of the Brave browser used Bitcoin.
In April of 2019, the GAB social network announced they were forking Brave Browser to adopt Bitcoin instead of BAT.
They can do this because the Brave architecture allows any decentralized currency to be used!
BAT substituted Bitcoin in the Brave project because ERC20 tokens are very cheap to transfer. This happened at a time when Bitcoin fees had increased a lot.
BAT tokens are ideal for micropayments.
Bitcoin on the other hand is expensive to transfer, takes longer than ERC20 tokens to confirm and would require something like Lightning Network in order to work as quickly as BAT (that’s what GAB is doing as far as I understand).
Brave offers a new paradigm for rewarding online attention. It distributes value to both users and publishers.
Everyone who adds value to online content gets rewarded under the Brave model.
That is a unique and revolutionary concept.
I hope many more people fork the Brave source code. GAB is going to add their own innovations to the code. Brave can merge those innovations back if they find them useful! Others may implement innovative ideas on top of Brave and that’s fine too. There’s enough fish in the sea for everyone.
The important thing to note here is that the Brave model is rich enough that folks immediately started forking it.
There’s some disagreement about which token to use, but the underlying idea has already been absorbed by the community.
It’s as if the concept of rewarding people for their attention span was always there.
It wasn’t.
That’s the real beauty of the Brave Rewards program.