Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube

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.

Brave also blocks ads. I would think youtube have a better chance at suing them.

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.

Agreed. I think it might come down to the entirety of the BAT ecosystem (ad blocking browser, optional ads that you earn $ for turning on, micro donation system in the spirit of patreon). I certainly think its worth watching to see how it unfolds at least.

Are ad-blocking services generally sued by ad-displaying websites? I've never heard of that happening, but I could certainly be wrong.

There have been attempts; they haven't succeeded.

Not generally, but it has happened. And the Brave business model of "block ads, then show our own ads instead" combined with this type of advertising is probably a clearer target than "some guy making uBlock for free".

Ad-blockers not. But Brave profits by replacing website ads with its own ads.

And what's to stop someone from creating a BATS blocker that simulates attention? Will there be a captcha like challenge?

I don't know about uBlock Origin (which is what you probably meant) but according to press articles AdBlock Plus gets paid money by Google to not block their ads, which feels at least in the ballpark to what Brave is trying to do.

The company behind Adblock plus also has been involved in lawsuits about their product (they won, so far)

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

Patreon censors conservatives off their platform. [Context if you don't know what I'm talking about -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw]

To some non-trivial minority of content creators that is reason enough to not use it. As someone who makes youtube vids and is thinking about scaling a brand, I want nothing to do with a tech platform that believes it should be the sole arbiter of who can and cannot solicit p2p donations/payments for their videos. I want a politically-neutral technology / payment mechanism.

Brave seems to be more ideologically aligned with myself, so I would rather go that route. Even though the current iteration has quite a few centralized stop-gates, I think it's feasible that Brave and the BAT system could ultimately provide a way for me to monetize my video content directly from users with BAT tokens and not have to deal with Jack Conte's moral grandstanding as a single point of failure for my revenue streams.

I think it's very closely related to Patreon. But a distinction that they are presumably hoping adds value is fine grained association of payments with how much content is being consumed.

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?

I'm sure YT can't (and probably wouldn't particularly want to) stop the monetization scheme, but the ad-blocking is going to interfere with the main-line business model that gets content creators paid, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's push-back on that (probably in the form of client-server verification the ad has been seen that leads to a good old-fashioned measure / countermeasure arms race to ensure the ads are served if the video is served---after all, how do you snip out the ads if they're baked into the video itself, for starters?).

Yes, Jim Sterling's videos are deliberately demonetized, his revenue comes via Patreon.

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.

> 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.

You really think a jury is going to buy this?

Imagine this for a moment: the Brave browser ships with a VR headset that automatically descends upon the user's eyes and ears for the duration of an ad, shielding them from their own screen (and thus the Youtube ad playing on it) and playing a different ad (or no ad) instead.

Does the same liability still apply?

I think that Brave lawyers will have an easy time convincing a jury that a merely drawing the user's attention to a different piece of content is not tantamount to damages to some website that happens to be among those open in their browser at the time.

a straightforward solution would be for YT to have some sort of revenue share bundled in for this feature. "Use our service, we take 5% for hosting/discovery". Basically what Patreon does.