If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.
People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.
Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.
My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.
I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.
Then maybe we'll get less blogspam and have a higher signal-to-noise ratio of sites run by people who are passionate about things and know what they're doing, instead of crap trying just get clicks to get paid.
Maybe videos would be 1 minute of quality content rather than 10 minutes of "be sure to click subscribe". Etc.
I'd prefer if those people had some sort of income so they could do what they're doing full time. Do you have any sort of idea for how that would work or do you just dislike the current system without any prescription for a better one? (The patreon model still requires people to follow your content, and subscribers help with that)
Hosting costs money. Design costs money. Maintenance costs money.
If the internet is to stay as alive and as open/accessible as it currently is for the public at large (despite increases in censorship), there needs to be more effort put into high availability and accessibility by more people than the enthusiasts who run revenue free sites/businesses that have other revenue streams.
People have been trained not to accept paywalls. But they do tip, as we see with patreon, superchats, etc, and and they do accept some modicum of ads and freemium services.
Brave provides options for all of those things; what I like most about brave is not its ad model, but its site donation model. It’s a very direct form of person to site donations that is built to be extremely convenient. I don’t know how it’s implemented, but if it's sufficiently decentralized (which I think it is, unless the BAT crypto currency is just a distraction from some centralized mechanism required for donations), that’s a potentially very valuable/difficult to censor/easy means of direct value exchange. Plus you don’t have the privacy concerns you do with ads.
My hope is that it becomes so convenient and popular to send money to sites via Brave and potential future competitors that the ad revenue model can be mostly replaced. That might be pie in the sky, but it seems plausible to me.
I also think it’s great that users get a big chunk of ad revenue. That percentage may change in the future, but for low income people who can get a few extra bucks by browsing normally/might be less likely to use ad blockers, something like Brave seems way better than seeing ads and not getting any revenue.