> 10 cents a day for a bit under a million monthly users

To clarify, do you mean a million monthly Brave users? Or just a million monthly users in general? 10 cents a day might actually be a lot if you were only getting one or two Brave users a month.

Users in general. We can't track Brave users because it blocks Google Analytics.

Not being able to track users is literally the main feature of Brave, so I'm not surprised it's difficult. It's as it should be.

I don't think the person you're replying to was saying they were surprised or expressing any opinion on whether they should be able to or not - they just said they can't.

sure you can. easily done with basic server side tracking by parsing the User-Agent header. you should be logging this any way in some kind of access log.

Their User-Agent is indistinguishable from Chrome, on purpose so I don't think you can just rely on that

Well, if it's Chrome and is untrackable, then it's Brave, easy.

That is not how that works. What about actual Chrome with ad blockers then? What about other browsers pretending to be Chrome? There are add-ons that allow you to randomise your user agent, etc, etc.

Does Chrome consult with ad blockers when it reports user activity to google?

That’s a feature for me as a user.

>We can't track Brave users because it blocks Google Analytics.

Isn't it possible to somehow look at user agents and do a raw count with some JS?

This should be possible by monitoring server logs with something like GoAccess

Brave uses the Chrome User Agent.

Uphold is working hard to acquire the bitlicense for New York. They shared on Twitter earlier this month that they hope to have this resolved soon.

It's worth noting that Creators also have a referral program whereby $5 in BAT can be earned for each user brought to the Brave platform. brave.com/refer

Thank you for your incredible patience and participation. We hope to see positive developments on the bitlicense front soon. Please do let us know if there is ever anything we can do for you in the interim.

Thanks for the details jonathan, but the referral program is a bad fit for PortableApps.com. Brave isn't interested in our standardized portable software format (download, install, auto-update, and manage hundreds of real apps in one system using an open format and open source tools). And the browser's 'portable mode' itself isn't actually portable. In fairness, though, all Chrome-ish browsers are broken portably.

Are there any plans to get rid of uphold on the publisher side and allow external wallets? It was a huge turn off to me when I signed up.

We need a regulated entity to do directed (tips, recurring), user-anonymous, off-chain transactions, and to comply with OFAC and other hard regulations. We can't do it ourselves. Wallet is the least of the issue, even if the publisher were willing to take BAT.

Our future phase (Apollo) blockchain work will move more txns on-chain but not solve all regulatory problems. No blockchain can do that unless you are using p2p directly, and then on the current big chains you don't have anonymity or low fees. This may change, we're working on it.

Please do not require people to submit their government ID in order to withdraw their tokens, after you inserted yourself in the donation flow of creators by offering to accept donations on their part from a priviledged UI.

We use platforms which do not ask for our ID, and we would prefer if you would not reduce the probability of Brave users donating to us because they think those BAT tokens will reach us.

Yes, unverified creators are marked as such, but a donation call in the browser UI is a powerful default, more so than the donation service preferred by the creator, which can only be shown as a web page.

> Please do not require people to submit their goverment ID in order to withdraw their tokens

Not verifying ID almost certainly causes a violation of American, British and European anti-money laundering code.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

So blockchain.com is breaking the law by not asking all their customers to upload their government ID and a selfie in order to withdraw the crypto they have received to a private wallet?

Blockchain.com's privacy policy states that, for anti-money laundering purposes, they'll collect:

> Passport and/or national driver’s license or government-issued identification card to verify your identity

(from https://www.blockchain.com/legal/privacy). That's consistent with every other exchange I've used.

Verification is only required to use their exchange, and not for withdrawing to a crypto wallet.

Brave would be able to offer BAT withdrawals for creators in a legally sound way.

https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001835987...

AML laws aren't anywhere near as precise as most people expect. It basicly boils down to "if bad guys use your platform, and you can't trace them, you're gonna go to prison".

10 cents per day money laundering?

We inserted ourselves? Our users are not passive victims, they chose to send tokens, mostly ones they earned from opt-in ads we provide. Your framing is telling. Users who want to get an ad revenue share and donate anonymously do not need to KYC, note well.

If you want to send p2p on a big blockchain, knock yourself out. This will do nothing to support the publishers you can see at batgrowth.com (more all the time, see batgrowth_bot on Twitter). It's a fine thing to do when you are sure of the destination address, and willing to fingerprint yourself on-chain. We never "insert ourselves" there -- no one can. That is the beauty of it. But it doesn't solve all problems.

Thanks for sharing your real world experience. For the sake of clarity, is that a million monthly figure for your entire site or for just Brave users? If the former, would you be willing to share the number or percentage of Brave users?

All users. We don't track brave users as they block Google analytics. The users who requested we participate thought it would be a good way to get 'free money' from Brave users like them that we were leaving on the table. That's definitely not the case.

Free money isn't free money?

Sure it's only a few bucks a month but look at that in terms of your user base. What are you going to assume your marketshare of Brave users is? For context consider the marketshare of Firefox is in the single digits. Brave is probably a fraction of that. If we assume Brave's popularity is 10% of that of Firefox, that'd give you an expected userbase of < 1% Brave users.

That'd be $3/month for, at most, 10k users. If your entire userbase was on brave that'd be $300/month for doing literally nothing. It's really quite a nice model.

Actually this also understates the profit per person for another reason. In Brave you have to opt in to the site rewards system. So you're likely not only seeing a fraction of your userbase paying you but a fraction of your Brave users.

If our entire userbase switched to Brave and we made $300 a month from them, I'd have to shut the site down.

Either way, it's really not worth the time and effort to set it up right now unless you're a huge site like wikipedia and you don't have any ad revenue to lose.

I do think it will be interesting what this does to donations to wikipedia. It would make sense, I think, that Brave users may donate less per user overall as they feel they are contributing by using Brave.

Here's an estimate, rough and from small-N sample size:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1155334969583030272

Quoting:

"Looks like 26 people donated 50.35BAT in 25 days. comScore has 100 page/day browsing average. Assume 1<=N<100 http://aternos.com pages per day for all 26 ppl & all unblock ads there: at most .65N x PageCPM <> 50.35 BAT or PageCPM <> 77.46BAT / N =~ $20/N. I believe BAT wins."

Again, disclaimers: rough, small-N, lots of other problems. We will do proper case studies as we can. But assuming we would max out at $300 to you is unjustified.

Thanks for that, Brendan. More data is always helpful, even when small-N like this. We're going to continue participating and monitoring it for PortableApps.com and see how things shake out. Also, the login page caching and editor issues seem resolved over the last few months so I updated my post in our forums.

The median donation to Wiki is, of course, $0. By giving anything users would be giving infinitely more than the regular user.

It'd be quite interesting to know what your aggregate CPM is. One way you could probably determine brave users is by contrasting raw user agents against your analytics data. The discrepancy there is going to be some mixture of Brave and those running other things that also block analytics like uBlock. But it should at least you give you a very rough ballpark CPM that's probably going to be much more reliable than e.g. a survey.

One other important figure that Brave could probably roughly answer (but also probably won't) would be what percent of Brave users opt in ads.

We do share numbers, working to get up from the 40% opt-in we had on desktop now that we've got ads on Android (iOS to-do). The opt-in is mid-teens right now, I think -- we will drive it up cleanly via telling users about it and rewarding them for joining.

To clarify a couple things since I never expected this to be a top comment... the visitor numbers were overall, we don't know how many monthly Brave users we have by design (Brave blocks Google Analytics and uses a Chrome user-agent). I could possibly come up with a way to specifically identify them anyway, but that kinda goes against what said user is trying to achieve by using Brave, so I don't want to do that. I do roughly calculate page loads that block Google Analytics server-side (anonymized) so we have a better idea of overall visitor numbers than GA alone provides.

Brave fixed a few of the complaints I had in the last few months with logins, header editing, and verifying with Uphold, so I've updated my linked forum post to reflect that.

I think it will be interesting to see how Brave's concept/tech will continue to evolve as it matures and has some traction.

It might interest you that Kraken recently started listing Brave's BAT as well:

https://blog.kraken.com/post/2664/bat-and-waves-trading-star...

I've been using Brave for almost a year and haven't been shown a single ad, I think it's only been a few months since the ads were enabled though. I wonder if the same happens for others.

Just to be clear you opted in to the program? Top right menu icon -> Brave Rewards.

By default no ads are shown.

Right, as soon as ads became enabled on mobile I made sure to opt in.

Any chance you'll do this with Coil.com next? Setup should be way way simpler and access the donations should be possible without any crypto at all.

We don't require the publisher to take crypto either. Why did you think we did?

Coil's Chrome extension is not doing well, I suspect in part because of Coil's absolutely terrible privacy policy.

What?

Had to look it up, it looks like he put $1000 towards California's Proposition 8 (to un-legalize same-sex marriage). In March 2014, he was named as Mozilla's new CEO, but resigned 9 days later under fire. https://www.cnet.com/news/mystery-startup-from-ex-mozilla-ce...

Can't find anything on the origin of the company name, I assume that's just hyperbole.

s/hyperbole/projection, also a lie/.

Brave is named for its users, who have to stand up to the surveillance status quo, sometimes at a price in lowing their shields or otherwise tangling with anti-ad-blockers.