
Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube - Helloworldboy
https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attention-token-platform-to-youtube/
======
joshuamorton
(disclosure, I work at google, and previously at YouTube)

This allows a user to donate to a content creator even if that creator doesn't
have any way to get access the donations. That is, until youtubers start
registering themselves in the payment tool, this is essentially watching
someone's video, and then throwing money into a hole.

With other patronage systems, like patreon, you cannot donate money until the
creator has an account. To me, that feels super sketch.

Edit: It reminded me to go and check my old bitcointip and altcointip accounts
on reddit, on which I apparently had combined closed to $30 in BTC at today's
prices, but which have both been shuttered and are now inaccessible. That's
not promising.

~~~
Ajedi32
The money doesn't go "into a hole". The funds are saved and a creator can
retrieve them at any time once they sign up for an account:
[https://brave.com/publishers/#getverified](https://brave.com/publishers/#getverified)
Basically, it's their money, and whether they decide to withdraw it or not is
entirely up to them.

IMO this is the right way to do it because it solves the chicken and egg
problem that would normally exist with a universal funding method like this.
Users don't have to worry about what payment platforms their favorite creators
support; they can just browse the web like normal and the platform takes care
of the rest.

~~~
joshuamorton
It's thrown into a hole in exactly the same way that my $30 I tipped btc is
not mine, because I never got it out of the system.

Edit: I said it better in response to a sibling of yours: I think it's
unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without my permission.

~~~
33W
> I think it's unethical for a platform to accept payment on my behalf without
> my permission.

Would it be similarly unethical to accept donations to {charity} without first
getting their approval?

~~~
dragonwriter
It would be unethical (and, quite probably, illegal) to actively solicit and
accept donations for a named charity and then hold on to them until the named
charity, with whom you had no previous arrangement, actively sought you out
and applied for an account which would allow them to receive them.

~~~
garrison
This is effectively how Amazon Smile works, although the technical details are
different: instead of soliciting "donations" they promise that 0.5% of each
purchase is given (by Amazon) to the user's charity of choice. But the charity
does not receive the money until they "register" their organization with
Amazon, and as far as I can tell there is no way for me to know if my chosen
organization has done so.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Amazon Smile only works with charities. Charities publicly list their
addresses in multiple public databases. Sending a cheque to that address is
easy. Not the same thing for non-charity content producers. (Not to mention,
taxes.)

~~~
Alex3917
> Amazon Smile only works with charities.

They work with any type of nonprofit, not only charities.

------
StavrosK
I just tried this after reading the article here, both on the producer side
and on the consumer side.

On the producer side, I registered my site by adding a file to the .well-known
directory, and that's it. I can now receive BAT or just USD/EUR to my bank via
some service called Uphold.

On the consumer side, it's nice, you top up to your browser directly (so no
third-party wallets or anyone to know what you visited, hopefully) and it
distributes the money you set per month to the sites you visited, based on the
number of visits. I bought some BAT and can definitely see myself using this,
if it were not for having to completely switch browsers (I use Firefox and
plan to keep doing that).

Overall, good job to the Brave team, the system seems very well-thought-out
(I'm not sure about how privacy is handled, but hopefully no third party will
know the sites I visited, even though I guess the Ethereum ledger is public
and someone could surmise this). Too bad it requires me to switch browsers to
use.

EDIT: One problem I saw is with Uphold, which quotes me 51,000 BAT/BTC (and
"no hidden fees"!) and then, as soon as I sent the money to buy the BAT, the
"activity" page quotes 47,000 BAT/BTC. So much for no fees.

EDIT 2: And now it charges me an extra $4 to withdraw, screw that. I'm not
going to spend a load of money on fees so I can spend money on content, so
creators can pay more fees.

EDIT 3: And it doesn't even let me withdraw (the "confirm" button stays
disabled). Also, I have special hate for forms that say "amount to withdraw",
include no fees in that, give you no "all" option and make you guess twenty
times which amount will withdraw the closest thing to all your money, while
the fee keeps changing every five seconds because of fluctuations. Screw
everything about this.

~~~
Kiro
Isn't it due to price fluctuations?

~~~
StavrosK
No, the "add funds" page still says 51,000. Hell, 52,000 now.

~~~
xjia
That's the spread.

~~~
StavrosK
The "add funds" page literally quotes the mid-market price that you're going
to receive when you buy coins, and then gives you fewer coins.

------
Cthulhu_
Yeah this isn't going to fly with Youtube itself, they're not going to host
ad-free videos so that a 3rd party can take their nontrivial portion of the ad
revenue.

Schemes like this are nice, but don't forget who pays for hosting, serving and
promoting the content.

~~~
Helloworldboy
I think you might be misunderstanding how it works. Its essentially Patreon.
Will it work? Who knows. Can youtube stop it from happening? Probably not any
more than they can stop Patreon.

~~~
thisisit
But then the question becomes what do these guys offer which Patreon doesnt?

Still my understanding is that Patreon doesn't automatically allow people to
view YT videos ad free. Sure people get donations and the amount of donations
drive the number of videos etc but they don't go into YT's territory.

~~~
glenstein
I may be misunderstanding something, since I'm not a youtube creator, but
couldn't someone sufficiently comfortable with the other revenue streams they
have at their disposal voluntarily choose to demonetize their own youtube
videos?

~~~
rcthompson
For now, yes. But what people are saying is that if large numbers of YouTube
content creators turn off ads and switch to getting their monetary support
through Brave, Patreon, or some other income stream that YouTube doesn't
profit from, there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in
the future to make video ads mandatory.

~~~
ForHackernews
> there's nothing stopping YouTube from changing their policy in the future to
> make video ads mandatory.

Ideally in that scenario, competition would push creators and viewers onto
some other platform.

Not sure how realistic that is, given the network effects involved with
YouTube.

------
four-yellow
From their contributor terms of service on the BAT website[0]:

"For each website receiving votes during a Calculation Period that is not a
Brave Publisher by the end of that Calculation Period, the BAT corresponding
to its votes will not be distributed at the end of that Calculation Period,
and will instead be held in an Uphold omnibus wallet for no less than ninety
(90) days thereafter. At that time, the undistributed BAT may be sent to
Company’s user growth pool, which is a pool of BAT that Company administers to
incentivize use of the Platform (as described more fully in Exhibit B of the
BAT Terms of Sale, available at [https://basicattentiontoken.org/terms-and-
conditions/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/terms-and-conditions/)). But if
the website receiving votes becomes a registered Brave Publisher before the
corresponding BAT is sent to the user growth pool, that website will receive
such BAT as Publisher Contributions in the first Calculation Period following
its registration."

So if you donate money to a content creator that hasn't signed up to be a
Brave publisher (and in doing so, agreed to Uphold's ToS), your donation will
go to the "User Growth Pool". From their regular ToS:

"Once the User Growth Fund is exhausted, it will be discontinued, and no new
BAT will be created for or transferred to the User Growth Fund"

So who knows where your donations will go if the content creator doesn't sign
up to receive them.

[0] [https://basicattentiontoken.org/contributor-terms-of-
service...](https://basicattentiontoken.org/contributor-terms-of-service/)

------
natural219
Lots of people here pointing out minor, easily fixable nitpicks here,
completely fail to understand how bad the ad/monetization/content world has
gotten. Ad fraud is still an insanely huge problem that companies like Twitch
and Youtube constantly wrestle with (former Twitch employee here).
Monetization policies are still arcane, unfair, and increasingly untenable for
many content producers on Youtube (google "Youtube monetization drama" if you
really don't know).

The whole idea that you can pay creators instead of watching ads is obviously
a good one, and this is really the best attempt so far at actually solving the
problem. Someone suggested implementing this as a chrome extension -- Really?
They took an ambitious route with building their own browser, but that's
obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way ads and
monetization work on the internet, which if you haven't paid attention, is
currently destroying everything good about the Web and eating away at the
values of civic society (again, see recent congressional hearings on Russian
Manipulation if you've missed the news)

(Disclosure: I hold a small amount of BAT, but mostly discouraged by the
finnicky nature of some of these comments that want Everything to be Perfect
Overnight without realizing the scale of the problem that Brave/BAT are trying
to accomplish)

Edit: If you want more reading on the subject of how screwed the digital
content monetization industry is, this link is also sitting on Hacker News a
couple stories below this one.

[http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-
media-c...](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash-
but-no-one-will-say-it)

~~~
Ajedi32
> that's obviously the correct move if Brave's goal is to transform the way
> ads and monetization work on the internet

Why? This doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

In fact, I'd argue the opposite. Depending on users installing and using an
entirely different browser just so they can get one feature that could easily
be implemented as a browser extension is likely to be a serious obstacle to
that goal.

~~~
natural219
Well. It would a while to explain the business and technological fundamentals
if you don’t already understand them. Check out their whitepaper
([https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...](https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePaper-4.pdf))
for their long-term vision and truly ask youself if this is implementable as a
browser extension.

Browsers need disruption anyway — chrome is increasingly buggy and slow, and I
trust “the person who literally invented browsers, javascript, and the modern
internet” to write another one.

~~~
tree_of_item
Wow. Brendan Eich didn't "invent browsers" or the modern freaking internet.

~~~
natural219
Okay, fine, that’s slightly exagerrated. A key pioneer of the early web,
inventor of Javascript, grandfather of the open web movement, and somebody
working diligently on core web intrarstructure for over 20 years. That better?

~~~
BrendanEich
“Father” - I’m not _that_ old.

------
wslh
Is the "ad-free YouTube video experience" something that violates some Google
user agreement? Just thinking that Brave is a high profile project and not a
tool you download.

~~~
NelsonMinar
I'm surprised YouTube doesn't just block the Brave browser entirely. The
entire business model of Brave is "siphon off some of the ad revenue from
websites".

~~~
mtgx
During an anti-trust investigation by a governmental body that has punished
large company before over abusing its browser monopoly?

Yeah, I don't think so.

~~~
hobofan
Do you mean Microsoft or something else I might be missing? In Microsoft's
case, they were punished for their OS monopoly being used to create a browser
monopoly by making a default choice for the user, not for abusing its browser
monopoly.

Blocking Brave for violating their usage agreements seems very much in another
league, even though it might sound like they are building a browser monopoly
via their video streaming monopoly. They are not in a position where they take
the choice of defaults away from the user, and as long as Firefox, Safari and
Edge have some market share, the user still has a choice of compliant
browsers. Blocking Brave might be more akin to enforcing their ToS for Youtube
via their Play store by blocking 3rd party apps with download function (which
is prohibited in Youtube ToS).

------
proaralyst
I think this is a service I'd use if it were available as an extension rather
than a browser in its own right.

~~~
Ajedi32
Maybe consider Flattr? From what I can tell it does basically the same thing:
[https://flattr.com/contributors](https://flattr.com/contributors)

~~~
hiq
It does the same with much more overhead for the user as far as I can tell.
The point of Brave is to have everything working behind the scene for the
user, so no friction.

~~~
detaro
What's the "much more overhead"? As far as I know, in the current state of
Brave you have to buy tokens, just like you put money in flattr. In the future
model, Brave will show you ads vs flattr taking money directly - is that much
more overhead?

(The implementations might differ in other important things, e.g. privacy or
fee structure, but the basic user attention model seems similar enough to me)

~~~
Ajedi32
Flattr _used_ to require the user to click a button to indicate they like a
particular page and want to support its creator. I assume GP is simply unaware
that that's not how Flattr works anymore.

Flattr 2.0 works more like Brave does; the user pays a monthly subscription,
and Flattr just automatically distributes those funds to creators based on
what sites the user views most often that month.

~~~
hiq
I stand corrected, I didn't know about this new version.

------
skywhopper
"The Brave browser provides an ad-free YouTube video experience. It also
enables a direct monetary relationship between the content creator and their
audience."

Is Google party to this? And if not, how is this sustainable model?

Honestly I hadn't looked into this browser previously, but I don't understand
what their value proposition is, beyond handwavey promises that crypto-
currency utility tokens and some future machine-learning developments can get
around the ad fraud problem.

But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and
revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.

~~~
jMyles
> But if they need to build this out by subverting YouTube's advertising and
> revenue flow and replacing it with their own, that is not going to last.

...why not? Subversion of Youtube's advertising and revenue flow sounds like a
prospect which enjoys high demand and low supply at the moment.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Google kicked the Echo off of YouTube for TOS violations.
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/youtube-is-no-
longer...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/youtube-is-no-longer-
available-on-amazons-echo-show/)

~~~
jMyles
I mean, you might then argue that the Echo (and, for that matter, Amazon
generally) was insufficiently surreptitious about it. If Brave can be more
difficult to distinguish, it will also be more difficult to ban.

~~~
CodeWriter23
No, _you_ might then argue that. :) Look how Uber’s behavior with paging and
canceling Lyft rides during their poaching days came back to bite them in the
ass. And I’m sure if Amazon’s small army of lawyers felt they had a leg to
stand on with the UserAgent obfuscation route, they would do it.

------
tlrobinson
What is the technical advantage of Brave using a new token like BAT instead of
directly using an existing cryptocurrency like Bitcoin that millions of people
already hold, and will likely be less volatile in the long term?

I feel like a lot of ICOs are simply used to try to capture a piece of the
cryptocurrency/ICO hype and avoid securities regulations, but there’s no
advtange to users.

~~~
RoboTeddy
I don't see a technical advantage either.

But I wouldn't say there's no advantage to users-- an ICO can let the founders
(a) raise funds, and (b) give them a financial incentive for the project to
succeed.

So in theory, ICOs can help users win because they can lead to great products
that otherwise wouldn't exist. (That said, a lot of teams/projects are total
junk.)

~~~
tlrobinson
That might be true in some cases (Brendan Eich, though?) but making your
product more complex for the user just to raise easy money seems like a poor
trade-off.

On top of that many ICOs seem to have unjustified valuations and reduced
oversight from investors vs traditional fundraising.

------
mtgx
Wouldn't it be ironic if an ad-blocking browser such as Brave gained
popularity with most YouTubers because of Google's self-inflicting YouTube
"ad-pocalypse"?

I think it would be sweet poetry.

------
jvehent
Genuinely asking: how is youtube supposed to pay for their own expenses when
everyone uses brave and depletes their revenue stream? Won't that kill the
platform itself?

~~~
cisanti
That is the problem of Google, who cares how they pay their bills? Also, if
they really wanted, they could block people using Ad/Ublock on their site, but
they don't. Why do you care about a multibillion dollar corp? I sure don't.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _who cares how they pay their bills?_

People having that attitude towards content creators is how we landed in this
mess in the first place.

~~~
wallacoloo
I'd just like to point out that GP didn't directly present that attitude
toward the content creators - just the host/provider, which is quite a
different thing.

------
amelius
Nice, but "discovery" is still handled by YouTube, and this is one of the most
important factors that determine the income of any given creator.

What we desperately need is a discovery system that is both _fair_ and
_useful_.

~~~
BrendanEich
One step at a time...

------
recursive
Replacing ads on the client side is normally associated with the scummiest of
malware. I'm not sure how Brave has maintained even a vaguely positive
reputation.

~~~
ballenf
I think your statement is overbroad in the sense that adblocking is also
replacing ads, in that case with empty whitespace but replacing nonetheless.
Brave allows users to put something else in the whitespace.

Brave is putting the ads shown (and more importantly reigning in the out of
control user tracking and privacy invading bullshit) in the hands of the user.

A side bonus is $ collected and available to content producers and website
owners.

If Brave weren't crystal clear about all -- if they marketed themselves as
purely an adblocker, for example -- then I think you'd have a point. As it is,
it's simply adblocking with a twist.

------
openasocket
The whole thing where they collect money on behalf of someone who may not have
an account and may be completely unaware of it seems unethical. It reminded me
of a similar snafu with a project called tip4commit, which allows users to
give bitcoin to projects they like. It also collected the money for any
project on github, without an opt-in (or even an opt-out) mechanism for the
project maintainers. Here's the issue where a lot of this got brought up:
[https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127](https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127)

------
relatedarea
I never watch youtube videos except for instruction videos and music videos.
Why does google insist on going ads only rather than ALSO OFFERING pay per
view?

I have the exact same gripe with facebook—their only viable method of
supporting content is itself ruining the site. Both companies are just leaving
money on the floor by committing entirely to a single (dying) revenue model.

This looks cool, but seems inherently untenable at actually getting the money
to the content provider without the content provider working with this
service.

~~~
j_s
Are you not aware of Youtube Red?

~~~
patrickaljord
US only.

~~~
detaro
Not strictly US only, but very limited availability, yes. There were some
rumors it'd launch in parts of Europe this year, but that hasn't happened.

------
guiomie
"It then displays it in the Brave Payments list, enabling the user to donate
back on a monthly" ... So this will block ads on Youtube, and the creators
will be compensated on donations? Does someone have a case-study on
content/Youtube creators potentially making a living of donations? This seems
like a bad business model: make creative videos and expect people to donate so
you can feed yourself.

~~~
Raphmedia
> Does someone have a case-study on content/Youtube creators potentially
> making a living of donations?

[https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt](https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt) \-
9,890 patrons - $36,214 per months in donations.

[https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey](https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey) \- 7,719
patrons - $19,439 per video in donations.

Edit: And there's
[https://www.patreon.com/DeFranco](https://www.patreon.com/DeFranco) at 14,268
patrons. His revenue is hidden but that's at least around 60k/month if not
more.

~~~
bpicolo
These are (currently) just the really exceptional cases though. Youtube is
building far more monetary value on the whole through ads.

~~~
jerf
Here's a more complete view:
[https://graphtreon.com/](https://graphtreon.com/)

Median income in the US is ~$42,000/yr last I knew. Call it $4K to make up a
bit for benefits and such. There isn't a hard-and-fast way to count because
some people hide their total, but there are clearly plural hundreds of people
above that line in the top 1000 [1]. There's several more hundred people
making poverty-line in most of the US (which as a relative measure, I can't do
a precise cut off), and before one starts moralizing about how horrible that
is, remember that they are not necessarily doing this as their only job. What
may not be enough to live on can still be a very very nicely paying hobby.

You are certainly correct that _overall_ , more money flows through YouTube. I
am much less convinced that that's a good thing in general, though. The
incentives on YouTube fluctuate a lot, but in general tend to support quantity
over quality. In fact as I think about it, I wonder if Patreon is helping prop
up YouTube a bit by helping the quality producers resist that; if YouTube
banned alternate monetization and tried to survive just on their own quantity-
over-quality metrics I wouldn't be surprised they would eventually experience
an eat-your-own-seed-corn collapse. I've listened to the YouTube videos of a
couple of the people chasing the quantity-over-quality treadmill that YouTube
ends up putting them on to stay on top, and it's not a life I'd want or wish
on anyone.

[1]: [https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators](https://graphtreon.com/patreon-
creators)

~~~
bpicolo
Many of them are businesses >> 1 person, and they're not all video. There's no
doubt some successful video creators on patreon, but it's still a pretty small
number.

Plenty of the video-based ones are in erotic media, too. It's definitely a new
and interesting income medium for that genre.

------
praulv
Coincidentally, I was just looking at MetaMask which links to Brave. Can
someone explain LI5YO how they're related? I understand MetaMask is a browser
extension to access distributed transactional content on Ethereum. Not sure
how Brave monetisation relates to that.

~~~
BrendanEich
We support MetaMask, as a chromium extension. It's really for developers and
power users of Ethereum, not part of our BAT platform.

------
tauntz
What happens when the receiver can not (or will not due to legal issues etc)
create a Brave account to retrieve the donation? It's lost forever? Will the
donator know if their donation was actually accepted or not and if not, can
they get their donation back?

------
deegles
Would I technically owe taxes on tokens received even if I'm never notified of
having received them?

Yes, I understand that if it's not reported it's unlikely anyone will be
caught, but by the letter of the law does receiving a token mean I've received
income?

~~~
ballenf
If you haven't signed up, you owe about as much taxes as you would if I put
your name on an envelope with $5 inside it and placed in my desk drawer.

------
dboreham
Interesting list of people on the about page. Marshall Rose for example.

------
rplnt
This won't block ads people put in their videos. It has to be youtube that
could enforce that.

------
exabrial
Cool, but how do you get users to install it?

------
splitbrain
Isn't this basically the same as flattr?

------
kevinastone
The screenshot shows their staging site: [https://publishers-
staging.basicattentiontoken.org/publisher...](https://publishers-
staging.basicattentiontoken.org/publishers/email_verified)

[https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-
attentio...](https://basicattentiontoken.org/brave-expands-basic-attention-
token-platform-to-youtube/images/image3_1.png)

