Former Mozilla CEO’s Brave browser blocks ads by default — but substitutes its own
Mandatory HTTPS and less tracking? Good.
Brave is designed to block so-called “programmatic advertising,” or ads purchased by digital networks, as opposed to deals and content negotiated by humans. In theory, programmatic ad buying increases efficiency and improves results, since the ads are now purchased and bid on by machines with incredibly sophisticated algorithms rather than by fragile meatbags. In practice, , these systems are easily exploited and are sometimes used to distribute malicious code.
Brave: Less a block and more a substitution
Here’s the catch with Brave, though. While Brave’s marketing makes much of blocking malicious advertising, it doesn’t prevent ads from being shown — it just changes what you see.
Here’s how Eich :
Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising “dirty pipe”, impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don’t have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.
Instead of seeing whatever ads a publisher has placed on their site, you’ll see Brave’s targeted ads. Brave still uses programmatic advertising, but will partner with specific ad networks that theoretically have better security practices. Brave will return 55% of ad revenue to publishers and give 15% of it to the browsers’ users. Another 15% of the ad revenue goes to the ad network, and Brave presumably keeps the last 15% for itself.
It’s an interesting concept, particularly the part where users receive a cut of the proceeds — but it’s not clear how meaningfully different this approach would be. As we discussed earlier this month, the very nature of programmatic advertising makes it difficult to perform security checks and guarantees. Brave undercuts the ability of websites to control their own digital experiences. While I understand that many users might view that as a good thing, it’s yet another example of a company trying to siphon control and revenue away from the company actually producing the content. There’s a saying: “If all your traffic comes from Facebook, it’s not your traffic.” The same concept applies to Brave and the idea of monetizing the browser in this fashion.
Eich has raised roughly $2.5 million in angel investor funding thus far, and the CEO claims he needs a stable user base of roughly seven million users to prove the system actually works. Right now, there’s no Brave binary executable you can download — the program just hit version 0.7, and you’ll need to be able to compile it if you want to test-drive it. The program is accepting applications for beta testing, but there’s currently a waiting list.
As an experiment, I’d be curious to see how Brave plays out. But I’m not thrilled about the idea of a browser that substitutes its own ads for what’s supposed to be on a page. We’ve seen third-party utilities do this for years — almost always with terrible results. Ad injections like this often harm page formatting or cause rendering issues, and while Eich has pledged to be a good citizen with minimal ads, there’s no guarantee that Brave’s “one-size fits all” advertising system would be sufficient to actually maintain a site.
Ad networks also have little reason to cooperate with the Web browser. From the ad company’s perspective, they’re buying space on a website, then paying Brave again to display the content that should’ve been shown in the first place.