from Hacker News

Total number of Brave Browser Publishers

by vicnicius on 9/23/20, 7:01 AM with 84 comments

  • by buro9 on 9/23/20, 7:45 AM

    I have 250k monthly users who are very addicted to the sites I run, my sites are their #1 destination. I've even encouraged people to use Brave (and Firefox) as I'm for any browser that improves privacy and easily allows a NoScript experience with per-site exceptions built right into the main browser bar (it's even easier than using NoScript in Firefox).

    From that... barely $10-20 per month.

    I simply don't believe that Brave users are actively topping up BAT so that it's distributed.

    Instead I put a PayPal donate button on one of the websites - no target published, no progress, just a dumb button on the home page and to the side.

    That single donate button gets ~$500 per month and is enough to cover most of the costs associated with running all of the websites.

    I still think the best way to provide a good, ad-free, tracking-free service - is to ask your users to contribute what they feel the value is.

    NB: This is not my job, I'm pretty sure I could make a lot more money if I cared to but this is a side project and done with no need for profit. Meeting costs is all I'm going for - BAT is not going to do that and my costs are low for what I serve.

  • by soulmerge on 9/23/20, 7:39 AM

    I tried visiting several of the websites, youtube channels, github accounts and vimeo accounts listed in the footer, but none of them contained any content.

  • by renewiltord on 9/23/20, 9:11 AM

    Brave did everything perfectly imho. You can't improve on the product for their market. If it works it'll establish a new model for funding. If it doesn't, we know there are lots of liars out there who said they'd pay if "some laundry list of unlikely requests".

  • by abdullahkhalids on 9/23/20, 7:58 AM

    These statistics are fairly useless without knowing how much these creators/publishers are making by signing up. If the median income is close to 0, then what's the point.

  • by vicnicius on 9/23/20, 7:33 AM

    Although I do not believe in Brave's model, it is interesting to see their publishers' growth. It is impossible to judge it objectively, but if such change would happen to be organic, I'd start questioning my belief a bit more.

  • by nicolas_t on 9/23/20, 1:20 PM

    As much as I dislike Brendan Eich's politics, he would probably have been a better leader for Mozilla... At least, that monetization strategy makes more sense and should have been pursued by Mozilla.

  • by Nginx487 on 9/23/20, 2:30 PM

    I've been actively supporting Brave (and Firefox) exactly until moment I stumbled into very unexpected news about Brave. After that I support Firefox only.

    "Brave browser is asking for donations on behalf of other people" (2018)

    https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...

    "Brave browser is hijacking links and inserting affiliate codes" (2020)

    https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-we...

    Link to Brave source code on the Github, inserting affiliate codes into URLs

    https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o...

    There's no valid reason to use a product, adopting totally unethical and scammer techniques. One more lesson on topic "If you don't pay, you're the product".

  • by jeremiahlee on 9/23/20, 7:47 AM

    I don’t earn much from either, but I’ve earned about twice as much from Brave as I have from Coil.

    I support the open Web Monetization standard more, so I hope more publishers add a tag. https://coil.com/creator

  • by merlinscholz on 9/23/20, 10:25 AM

    If only there was a Brave version with a Gecko renderer it would be the perfect browser.

  • by skee0083 on 9/23/20, 2:01 PM

    It's free money so it's no surprise publishers are growing, but that doesn't mean the Brave user base is growing along with it.

  • by pmontra on 9/23/20, 9:20 AM

    It's about Brave's Creators Program https://creators.brave.com/

    I forgot about it. Does it work only for people using Brave, right?

  • by 0vermorrow on 9/23/20, 8:37 AM

    Are there any users here who actually ran Brave ad campaigns?

    I'm wondering what is your overall experience, how much of your ad campaign traffic were bots and how did it fare compared to other ad platforms.

  • by andybak on 9/23/20, 7:26 AM

    I don't understand "publisher" in this context.

    Anyone?

  • by kyrers on 9/23/20, 10:09 AM

    I'm starting to investigate Brave a little more. I read about it a long time ago but it seemed a "too-good-to-be-true" situation.

    The most recent articles I read on it list a considerable number of advantages, but then conclude against using it, simply considering it an ad company that does not pay content creators.

    I'm interested to know your opinions, and if you can point me to some useful resources, I would appreciate it.

    Thanks

  • by jtbayly on 9/23/20, 1:47 PM

    Why do they list Soundcloud, if the number is 0?

  • by spiderfarmer on 9/23/20, 8:16 AM

    A large amount of people who use Brave installed it for the ad blocker. They have no problem depraving well-meaning publishers of quality content of the only viable way to monetise it.

    Expecting those people to pay up is a pipe dream.

    If Brave was fair it would enable publishers to block visitors who don't pay.

    Why is it fair to block ads, but unfair to block visitors?