Was there any evidence this ever happened? I feel like people conflate "a browser with an ad-blocker, plus a separate incentivized advertising system" with something that literally inserted advertisements where the removed ones were.
I get Brave ads as either on its main tab, or as separate notifications I get a reward for. I can believe there were variants on that, but I want more information about what they were.
>In June, reports emerged, which stated that the company had been quietly inserting affiliate links for certain search queries without telling users. For instance, Brave had added a home widget for Binance a month prior, which turned out to redirect users via its affiliate offering.
Replacing one ad system with another ad system/modality doesn't negate the presence of ads. It just changes the modus operandi. Much like getting your daily nicotine kick from vapes instead of cigarettes.
The ideal situation would be to have no ads if the browser is (often) advertised privacy-first. But then we know the world isn't perfect. We work around tradeoffs.
As long as Brave keeps these contentious options transparent, I have no problems in supporting them.
For one you can disable the popup ads. Additionally you get paid if you do enable the ads. So it's quite a different system where the user is put first in both cases.
> outside of screwing over the content creator. You're visiting a site for content, and the one really getting paid is Brave
I really wish I had focused on subscription growth instead of ad growth when I was in the content business (I had a few sites over 1m uniques per day). There's just something to delivering something so valuable that readers are willing to pay for it. You end up being much more focused on quality instead of driving ad clicks and directing your readers off site. That said, times have changed a lot, and people now seem much more willing to pay than 10 years ago.
You are getting paid as well. If you want to reward the content creator, you can.
To me that model is a lot better than the status quo. Content creators that I think are producing quality content get rewarded, while those pushing content to attract eye balls lose power.
Not with BAT. But Brave buys the BAT it gives users from the open market using their ad revenue, as far as I know. Which means the creators can sell the BAT for real money, which does pay bills.
The creators that I do support get more from me in BAT than the zero dollars they get from my viewing of their content in Google/Facebook/Twitter/Youtube. This is what matters.
