Users can extend the browser using numerous add-ons, some of these run on a GPL license. It’s better for you and us that we don’t store any of your data without your permission.” Architectureīrave is an open-source browser that utilises an MPL license and is built atop Chromium, the open-source project maintained primarily by Google. In the inaugural post in 2016, Brendan Eich, co-founder of Brave, said, “we keep user data out of our cloud Brave Vault by default. Brave does not enable personalisation, and machine learning algorithms don’t suggest content to the user. The company promises its users that it does not store any user data without consent. Nonetheless, the browser has 32.4 million active monthly users as of May 2021.

Brave claims to be a privacy and user-focused project, but the introduction of payments for ads does not align with its philosophy. Publishers are paid in BAT, which is an indirect method of payment than the local currency. Content creators have a worse off deal than in other ecosystems like that of Google. The model has been criticised and even threatened to be litigated by publishers condemning it as a parasitic model making money out of others’ content. Although Brave blocks ads by default, it does not block first-party ads. Each month, users can withdraw their BAT in the form of cash or pay it forward as a tip to their favourite content creators and websites with its manual tipping feature. Brave will keep track of the time a user spends on websites and then divide up the BAT to pay websites each month based on the calculated time. Users will be able to receive payments in the form of Brave’s BAT cryptocurrency that goes into the user’s Brave wallet. Brave keeps 15% of the revenue generated, and the remaining 15% go to advertising partners. The browser shares 75% of its revenue, where the user gets 15% and the publisher a 55%. With ad blocking, Brave scrubs websites of their ads and then replaces those slots with the ads it sells. Users have the option of turning on ads to replace targeted ads with generic ads for which the user will be paid in Brave crypto Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). Brave browser has built its model atop this need for privacy and data protection.īrave positions itself as a privacy-focused search engine, promising faster load times. The unabashed collection of data has sparked a lot of conversations around privacy and surveillance. A huge part of tech companies’ revenue comes from user data.

Brave browser ads not working