All sensible points. But you're missing some key points about the Brave Ads proposal. For starters, it's entirely optional. If you don't want ads, you don't get ads. You must opt into this system to see any ads.

Secondly, for those who opt in, they decide how often they'll see an ad. And unlike annoying interstitial ads and more, Brave Ads begin outside of the browser as a system notification. If you wish to see the ad, click the toast. If you don't, simply dismiss or ignore it.

As for the desire to see ads, many users (myself included) don't mind this. In fact, I enjoy high-quality ads that don't require me to give up personal information. I'd love to know about a sale at my favorite store, gift ideas for my wife's birthday, and more. The problem is, to get this today, I have to hand over too much to Google and Facebook. Unacceptable.

With Brave's on-device machine-learning, you hand over nothing. Ads are proposed to your device, and your device choosing what you might like to see. And you, as always, remain in complete control. Should you decide to see an ad, you'll even get paid for your attention (70% of the revenue in user-private cases).

But the baseline is always the same; if you don't wish to see Brave Ads, Brave won't show you Brave Ads. That's our promise to you.

Let's say bees. "I see the problem is bees in your car. We would like to solve this by filling your car with different, quieter bees. In exchange for this, we are willing to give you some of the honey."

More like, "in exchange, we'll make more honey that you can buy from us too."

I gain nothing by watching ads. All I get is the creation of a need or desire that I didn't have before I watched the ad. Ads increase demand. Telling me that your business will fail unless I voluntarily inconvenience myself is not endearing me to your business.

If you wish not to see ads (even ads which don't track, and pay you 70% of their revenue), then you stick with the default, out-of-box experience. Brave is an ad and tracker blocker, by default.

No, if I don’t want ads I use an ad blocker and script manager that only exists to block out what you’re selling. As a bonus I get to hope that far from being able to help save this wretched industry, I can help to hammer some nails in its coffin. Your business model would only be remotely appealing if things like uBlock Origin, NoScript and uMatrix didn’t exist. Fortunately they do, so I don’t even have to think about malware ads, inefficient ads, and just plain annoying ads. Even better I don’t have to “be the product being sold” or have to waste my mental energy critically thinking through the bullshit that is advertising.

Life without endless, wheedling attempts to sell, upsell, and generally manipulate you into buying more crap is frankly better than the alternatives. I can’t tell you how many cord cutters I’ve met who lost their tolerance for tv advertisement once they weren’t bathing in it every day. Ads are miserable, they drive a consumer culture that is pointless, and lead to endless loads of clickbait and “content” thst exists just be a platform form advertisement.

The industry doesn’t need saving, it needs euthanizing.

"I gain nothing by watching ads."

You get the site getting revenue, which allows it to continue existing and creating the content you enjoy.

I don't generally like ads, but sometimes they do advertise a product that I needed anyway or is better than what I was using before.

No, Brave says "no bees" by default. Secondly, you are hoisting upon ads a prejudicial bias by likening them, necessarily, to bees. Ads aren't the problem; the bees who hide behind them are. Either way, if you don't want them, you don't get them. It's an opt-in system.

Brave's home page proudly promises to "Block Ads" in big red <H4> tags and tries to convince you that the "average" user is losing hundreds of dollars a year over ads. Are you sure you want to talk about hoisting a prejudicial bias upon ads?

The new bees also never sting anyone, which is pretty good.

When a site advertises to support itself, it's entering a consensual and mutually beneficial relationship with visitors: readers give up a sliver of their attention and in exchange get otherwise-free content.

Are you suggesting that we make it illegal to enter into this kind of consensual and mutually beneficial business arrangement?

Brave doesn't touch first-party ads. If you wish to advertise to your visitors, we respect that. But opening a tunnel to third party ads and trackers, which are foisted upon the user without their consent, is not okay.

Ads are no longer pixels on the screen; they're so much more than that. They're monitoring your activity, your movement, your most intimate details, and more. They're collecting this data, storing it, selling it, and all without your consent.

Users have the right to protect themselves. Unfortunately, the current solution (simple ad-blocking) hurts the web and all who create it. Brave wishes to deliver a better solution; one that protects the user, and serves the content creator.

By improving the system, you reduce fraud, which in turn creates more revenue for the content creators and users alike. Everybody benefits under this model, unlike the current model, where everybody is equally, and increasingly suffering.

What is the fraud you're trying to reduce? I know advertisers think that not watching their ads is fraud. Is that what you mean?

Not at all. Fraud is more like ad-stacking; triggering false impressions, bot-driven click-farms, and more.

> Brave doesn't touch first-party ads. If you wish to advertise to your visitors, we respect that.

That's pretty interesting. So, as an online publisher, if I make my own deals directly with the advertisers and then host and serve the assets myself, Brave doesn't flag it.

I used to do this, but it's very time consuming. I've essentially delegated this work to Adsense.

But AdSense doesn't do a good job of it. I've seen ads that mess my browser's scroll bar, mine Monero, and pretend to be warnings from the FBI. That's why I use an ad blocker.

Frankly, you should take responsibility for every resource that your web page pulls down. I don't really care whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it, but if your ad network is serving up malicious JavaScript on a regular basis, then they're not doing their job right and you should fire them.