But the UGP won't last forever, and users (generally) aren't going to fork out their own cash to support their favorite websites. This is why we're working on Brave Ads in parallel to our browser efforts.
Brave Ads is an opt-in component which utilizes local machine-learning (operating on browser history) to select ads in a non-leaky manner. With matching and more taking place on the user's device, the system is simplified, leading to less fraud and abuse.
What's most exciting about the simplified model proposed by Brave Ads is the ability to share revenues with the user themselves (as much as 70% of ad revenue goes to the user). When you reform ads to the point that they aren't collecting information or monitoring your activity online, and are instead loading quickly, respecting your privacy, and [paying you for your attention], you make the entire system more appealing.
Any Attention Tokens earned by users can go into supporting their favorite websites and/or content creators. This reduces/eliminates the burden on the user to fund their wallets themselves.
Brave's model creates a better system (consent-based) which protects the user's data (on their device, with no leaking), cuts out complexity (which reduces fraud and middle-men), and in turn is able to put lost revenue back in the hands of publishers. Beyond this, Brave is able to bring the user into the fold, as their attention is the commodity being bought.
There have been some exciting developments in this space before us, but none that stuck. While we laud those who came before us, we understand that the problem was never fully tackled. That's what we are doing with Brave.
1. Locate and open Addons screen (~2-3 clicks in the browser menu).
2. Locate and click "Get more addons" (1 click).
3. Wait for store page to open, search for desired extension. (Around a dozen keypresses for average-length extension name.)
4. Locate and click "Install" (1 click).
5. Confirm modal dialogs for installation and permissions (1-2 clicks).
That's nowhere near one-click and even if it were a one-click operation, 90% of users don't even know they would want to do that click.
We also did plenty of other marketing and onboarding to get users interested, it wasn't just slapping together an extension and calling it done. 99% of the friction came from people not wanting to pay for content, not the technical workings.
People are not going to start signing up payments into their browsers without some kind of onboarding. An extension installation was the most trivial part of this process compared to actually explaining and convincing them to pay.
I put together a small team to create an adblocker/payment solution a few years ago that used a flat rate with payments proportional to engagement (combination of time and depth) per domain, similar to systems like Spotify (number of plays vs total). It failed because people fundamentally don't want to pay for website content this way. You can't just wave away things like "too many decisions" when that's a serious blocker, especially for something that the entire world has been trained to consider as free.
You need to change behavior first. Until then, ads (putting aside implementation and UX issues) are still the most fair, fast, and scalable payments system around.