What's the idea here? I was under the impression that one of the selling points of Brave is that you don't get ads when browsing. Doesn't this go against that?
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It's Freemium, you pay $3/month for no ads, or you get ad-supported search _that is privacy focussed_ for free. They're running their own index, it costs money.
The question is whether this is better than Google's offering ... to me it sounds like it is so long as the results stand up to scrutiny.
Brave's USP always seems to have been meaning the web work practically without profiteering and maintaining a strong user privacy focus. It always seems to have had payment for content as a part of their model, and so payment for search seems to fit well in that framework.
I admit it does seems to be a climb down for those who see Brave as "free + no-ads".
Brave's key selling point was that it respects privacy, and it blocked ads because web advertising is usually antithetical to privacy.
I imagine their idea here is that "ads aren't bad if they respect privacy/don't weaken security", but I'm thinking most Brave users are going to disagree.
Brave has never tried to be ad free. Instead the goal is to encourage less intrusive and more benign ads.
hard to see how that meaningfully differentiates them from everyone else given that this is what all the ad platforms seem to be moving towards with topic/cohort based ads and third party cookies on the way out.
Brave's been blocking third-party cookies from the beginning; Firefox and Safari followed in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Third party cookies might not have been on the way out if Brave hadn't taken that first step already.
I guess they have failed in marketing the differentiation then (if there is one). I was just clarifying the product in question, never promised an ad free product.
Only a HNer will twist themselves in a logic knot claiming "I prefer to be bombarded with ads that aren't relevant to me"
This reply appears to be both a strawman (I never said anything about my preferences) and an ad hominem attack (Diminishing my comment bc of who I am).
There are three ways you can gets for goods and services in this world
i) Pay Money (HNers who claim, i'll-pay-for-no-ads-services are pathetic liars as seen from the adoption rate of YouTube premium which offers exactly that service).
ii) Pay through watching Ads
a) Watch relevant but low volume targeted ads (allow tracking)
or
b) Watch irrelevant but higher volume ads (no tracking -- pihole)
Most HNers who complain have made their choices very vocal. They prefer (ii)b and yet they make sad pikachu face when they are bombarded with Ads.
When Ads aren't effective (not targeted), it's compensated by higher volume. It's, Economics/Math 101.
It is your bed that you have chosen
I don't prefer to be bombarded with ads. But a lot of the bad in ads is tracking and being insanely intrusive visually, not that they exist in the first place.
see my other reply