According to a recent online statement from Brendan Eich, chief executive of the privacy-focused Brave web browser, users of the browser can earn sizeable rewards just for viewing ads. Earlier this week, Eich replied to a comment thread on Hacker News, in which he predicted that an individual user could make over $70 in the year of 2019 if they opt-in to view ads through the Brave browser.
Users and publishers will both be paid out in the Basic Attention Token (BAT), which has a native wallet build into the browser. Since the size of the payouts are actually tied to the price of BAT, Eich predicted that net user revenue could reach as high as $320 in 2020.
In his reply, Eich said:
The individual take has yet to be demonstrated, but do some math. $80B gross USD (at least; the IAB said $88B) spent on digital in US last year, say across 250M people (with Dr. Augustine Fou of NYU estimating fraud took $16.2B, lots of bots too). That is $320 gross ARPU if spread evenly — which it is not. (Note we are worldwide and build for Europe and Asia too, not just at the US.).
Many of Brave's users at this early stage are “lead users” (Eric Von Hippel, MIT) and represent off-the-grid prospects because they block assiduously, either in Brave alone or with Brave + uBO or another solid blocker. Lead users are worth much more due to their high usage of search, ecommerce, and paid services. I would not be surprised if our users can make $70/year as we bring the system up in 2019 — when ad deals will be harder to come by and we'll subsidize revenue from BAT's User Growth Pool — and climb by 2020 to above .7 * 320 or $224 net user revenue per year
Brave’s BAT integration offers one of the easiest on-ramps to cryptocurrency markets that the industry has seen. Everyday web users who might be nervous about investing portions of their paychecks into crypto, now have the option of earning BAT for free, just for browsing the web as they normally do. Then they will have the choice of holding onto the BAT, cashing it out, or dumping it into an exchange to start trading other coins and tokens.
Last week, CryptoGlobe reported that Brave dumped Google in France and Germany over concerns that the search engine was sharing user data with third-party companies for the purpose of personalizing advertisements. Brave has also filed a formal complaint against Google in Europe, alleging that Google’s advertising practices violate the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).