Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube

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...

> 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.

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...) 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.