By: Kevin Kirby
Former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich has launched a new Internet browser called Brave that blocks advertisements by default, only to provide new ad space for Eich to sell.
Advertising is sick, Eich says. It’s intrusive, tracking users with “cookies, tracker pixels, fingerprinting, everything.” His solution is to block such forms of “intrusive advertising” and instead use consumers’ local browsing history to target ads. Of the new advertising revenue, Brave will keep 15%, 55% will go to the content publisher, and 15% will go to the ad supplier. The final 15% will go to consumers, who can allocate those funds like credits to remove ads from their favorite sites.
Ad-blocking technology has great potential for increasing consumer privacy protection and browsing speed, but it is unclear whether those benefits are retained in a browser that simply replaces old ads with new ones. Nevertheless, it is quite a novel development for a browser to sell ad space instead of the content providers and publishers. Eich likens his extrication of the adtech middlemen to “putting chlorine in the pool.”
Eich’s team has raised $2.5M in investment so far and hopes to reach 7 million users this year. If the popularity of current ad-blocking plug-ins is any indicator, Brave might present a serious challenge to the current Internet advertising business model.