You can't pay me cents to pick a worse browser. It's like the days when there were those pay to surf companies. The promise of money is nice, but most end users don't benefit that much from it. There's a lot more incentive for the company for their product to work than there is for the users to adopt it.
(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)
I mostly use Brave on my phone because it makes the browsing experience faster and removes most ads by default. I won't change to another browser on the iPhone anytime soon. Having said this, I haven't used the payments feature outside of web3 (Ethereum DApps).
I don't watch ads with any interest or attention in general, but I often have Youtube playing some live concert on the background while I work and ads cut midway forcing me to change tabs so I can skip them. The idea that instead of breaking my concentration to stop an add playing I can simply let them and that _that_ could be a little money generating activity seems appealing.
(edit a word)
Why build a browser and not extensions for top browsers?
Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
=> give them feedback if you’re interested
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.
I happen to be working on this right now http://browsercoin.com, if anybody is interested in beta testing it out, my email is in my profile.
> Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
Basically, their FAQ answer is debatable because the Chrome API is more than enough to support a Patreonesque model, if you have uBlock and other privacy focused extension, you don't even need to download a heavy browser client.
Hence the name BrowserCoin, I'd be open to feedbacks on what you would like to see happen with it.
I have no affiliation, I have zero of whatever their coin is, but I randomly signed up for their mailing list a while back out curiosity.
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
(And you can still make extensions that offer partial functionality, such as the a BAT wallet for donations, but without the whole BAT Ads platform built in. You would get full functionality in apps that integrate BAT with the SDKs or if you use Brave itself. Chromne API gives access to browser history, and making a BAT wallet is pretty easy.)
They're also offering SDKs for other apps: e.g., mobile apps, smart TV apps, etc.
See this post: https://basicattentiontoken.org/driving-user-adoption-and-ex...
Secondly, Brendan Eich already confirmed that there is a 70% revenue share for users. Let's pretend the advertiser is paying 10 cents per view, then you would get 7 cents per ad watched. 70% is a lot.
Thirdly, even if it's just a few cents, it's better than nothing. Things build up over time. Before you know it, you'll have a few $. That's awesome. You can get a month of subscription on a ton of websites for like $3. That's also 3 songs on iTunes store, or a paid app on the app store.
Sounds like pwaai is literally working on browsercoin right now! :)