A brave move by Brave

Current online ads landscape
Advertisers and publishers are always in search of targeting the right user group and the actual presenting of ads to the user. Users are the most undervalued actor of the use case. The ads intrude into the viewing area, uses up bandwidth, make the overall experience poor. In most cases, the users enjoy the service for free by viewing the ads e.g. Youtube.

Brave browser has taken this use case and improvised to make it a win-win situation for all. Here is what Brave has done.

Brave Browser
Brave itself is an open-sourced browser specialized in ad and website tracker blocking and private browsing capabilities. And it does it efficiently.

Now to get to the technology behind brave.

Brave is Google's Chromium web browser like other browsers like chrome, partners with search engine DuckDuckGo. The browser has added Tor for private browsing. The browser has combined its capability with a blockchain-based platform to connect the advertisers with the consumers with no multilayered middlemen. The network that brave would connect to is the first of its kind blockchain-based digital advertising platform called TAP network. Braves network is based on Etherium blockchain and it uses a token Called Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) as the cryptocurrency for rewards for the users or viewers of the ads. The browser gives users an option to opt-in viewing ads and only those users will see ads as a notification separated from the content that they are viewing.

Brave Ads are shown to the user based on the data that is stored locally to the user's browser and hence it does not require a remote tracking system and users data to be sent out.
The browser also gives you the option to choose how frequently you want to view the ad.

This use-case of online advertisement implementation on top of a blockchain network is clearly a disruptive one that opens up a lot of possibilities. The token that users collect can be claimed back as any fiat currency or tip content writers, encouraging them to produce more quality content. At the time of writing 1 BAT (0.00093990 ETH) = USD 0.160672.