You opt-in to the ads, you get them in your notifications, and every time you tap on one of them you get a few BAT. You browse, the BAT get paid out to whichever sites you visit (or linger on, depending on your configuration). You can opt out of the ads at any time. Brave didn't pre-mine their own coins. And you can buy BAT if you want to support sites without watching ads.
Showing people ads is part of the problem to be solved.
And the website gets paid either way.
Not every person/site can run on Patreon or sponsorship deals. And paywalling a lot of the web would exclude vast swathes of people.
2. "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
3. The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
You do. The ad broker sells access to your eyeballs to a company, and then gives part of that money to whichever parties have a monetization agreement in the content.
> "How else would you achieve X than by manipulating people visiting your website into paying for things they probably don't need, and be misinformed and tracked by powerful commercial and political entities?" - I can but shrug at this question.
Always fun to see people with strong opinions be critically misinformed.
Brave’s ads don’t have tracking, by design.
> The vast majority of written content is never rewarded or compensated monetarily, ads or no ads.
By that logic we should stop paying for art?
The others can shut up.
Research is usually not paid by ads.
Some of the best scientists did it for fun. Einstein wrote his 1905 papers while working at the swiss patent office.
- Publishers no longer show you ads, they just get paid out of BAT.
- Brave shows you ads, but Brave does not depend on that to survive. Because of that there is no weird conflict of interest like with Google/Facebook, where the party that surfaces your content is also the party providing you with ads.
- Users can just browse the web without ads as a threat vector, but as long as you have BAT (either via opt-in Brave ads or by purchasing it directly) you are not a freeloader either.