Brave Browser Adds YouTube Support

• Toshendra Kumar Sharma
• December 14, 2017

The Basic Attention Token platform, which lets users, publishers and advertisers come together to get rid of mediators in the online ad marketplace has expanded its support to YouTube. Users can now set up their Brave browser to automatically pay BAT tokens to their favorite YouTubers by watching them. Let’s take a look at the basics and see what the BAT platform offers to users and content creators.

Basic Attention Token: Summary

Basic Attention Token (BAT) is part of the Brave browser eco-system focused on reforming the online advertising industry. Brendan Eich is the co-founder of the Brave browser which is also the creator of JavaScript and the Mozilla foundation. It is a Chromium-based web browser which has integrated Basic Attention Token support to pay for a user’s online media consumption by keeping a ledger of their activity online.

In the current scenario, companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are privy to a lot of our web browsing habits and use that information to “re-target” us on different websites. 

For example:

“If you searched for a pair of shoes on Amazon and left the website to visit some other page like Reddit, you will see ads for shoes which are based on your search history. This is quite problematic as several third-parties knows your personal information that they can use to target you.”

Ad-blockers are increasingly getting used to blocking all the ads, but this system is also problematic as this prevents content creators to monetize their work efficiently. This is the big problem that the Basic Attention Token platform is trying to solve. Here’s how the BAT system works. Let’s say a user allocated $5 a month to share with websites that he visits. Now, Brave will keep a ledger of all the sites that the user visits and at the end of the month, pay those websites in BAT proportionally to the amount of time the user spends on the website. In this process, there are no central servers involved that track the user as all of the book-keeping is handled by the Brave browser.

Youtube Integration

On November 15, 2017, BAT announced on their blog that Brave is extending the BAT platform to Youtube bringing the technology closer to mass adoption. With the latest Brave browser release, users can choose to distribute their contributions either based on the amount of time they view a channel or just “pinning” a particular amount to the channels they want to support. This is particularly useful for smaller Youtubers, who have fewer than $10,000-lifetime views, as they do not receive ad-revenue from YouTube. It also helps the users as the built-in ad blocker prevents them from being tracked and since all the bookkeeping is done by the browser, they do not have to trust their personal information with any third-party organizations while also supporting the content creators.

Earlier, BAT could only be distributed on a domain-to-domain basis, and creators could not be listed as individual publishers in Brave Payments (the part of the Brave browser that maintains the ledger). Now, Brave browser can automatically pick up the content creator of any YouTube video, regardless of the site which embedded the video to let the payments flow directly to their wallets. YouTube content creators need to verify their Google email accounts with Brave Payments before they can start receiving the monthly BAT payments by using the OAuth payment standard by accessing the links from here.

Use Case

The most prominent advantage of using Brave Payments for Youtube is going to be for smaller Youtubers otherwise they have no way to monetize their work. This model is also inherently better for all users, content creators and advertisers who can choose what kind of ads they see without their personal information being sold. By incentivizing the user to watch commercials by getting paid in BAT, advertisers also reach a more engaged audience in a non-intrusive way which is beneficial to both the parties involved.