Brave Browser Will Pay You to View Ads (But There's a Catch)

A little-known browser has a crazy idea: It's proposing to pay you to view ads.

On Tuesday, the privacy-focused Brave browser began previewing the new advertising model, which promises to funnel 70 percent of earned revenue to users who load up and view the ads. The remaining 30 percent will go to the browser's developers.

The revenue sharing will occur through Brave Rewards, an opt-in feature now available in the test build of the browser's desktop version. Once activated, it'll serve ads that you can view to earn a digital token called BAT.

The company behind the browser, Brave Software, won't begin rolling out the actual token rewarding for another several weeks. But it estimates participating users will be able to earn around $60 to $70 this year, and possibly around $224 in 2020.

Of course, there's a big catch. You can't withdraw the tokens you've earned and convert them into cash. At least not yet. Instead, Brave wants you to spend your digital tokens on rewarding your favorite publishers on the internet, such as news websites or YouTube personalities.

"The idea is for users to get the big revenue share and give back to their top sites and creators," Brave CEO Brendan Eich tweeted.

Eich, a former Mozilla CEO, has been talking up the revenue-sharing idea since 2016, when the Brave browser first launched. By default, the browser comes with an ad blocker. However, Eich doesn't want to eliminate online ads, only strip out invasive web tracking.

Brave's new reward program will do this by serving up ads that'll preserve your digital privacy. "Unlike conventional digital ads, ad matching happens directly on the user's device, so a user's data is never sent to anyone, including Brave," the company said in a blog post.

At first, the ads will appear as a tiny pop-up in the corner of your screen as you browse the internet. You can then choose to view the ad by clicking the notification, which will generate the full ad in a private tab. To serve the relevant ads, Brave's on-device ad matching will look at the keywords in the webpages you load. Users can also select how many ads they'd like to see per hour.

Later this year, Brave plans to ramp up the system with ads that'll appear in the webpages you visit. However, these ads will only share 15 percent of the revenue to the user. Seventy percent will go to the publishers and content creators hosting the ads. The remaining 15 percent will go to Brave.

"With Brave Ads, we are reforming an online advertising system which has become invasive and unusable," the company said in its blog post. "Brave Ads remove intermediaries that exploit user data and thrive on surveillance, and instead offer a consent-based system."

Although the digital tokens are meant to fund websites and content creators, Brave also envisions the currency being used to buy premium content over the internet. In addition, you'll be able to withdraw the tokens, letting you cash out your earnings, Eich said on Twitter. But it's unclear when the withdrawal function will arrive.