Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
When we are still discussing the possibility of large-scale implementation of the blockchain, there is such a blockchain product that has successfully entered the Internet world and reached tens or even hundreds of millions of users.
According to a post on Reddit on Sept. 8, the blockchain browser Brave has surpassed competitors such as Firefox, Opera and Chrome for the first time in Google Play in Japan, Cointelegraph reported.
It is reported that Google Play's ranking is affected by many factors including: crash rate, application unresponsive rate, background processing and so on. According to a screenshot of the Reddit post, Brave had 2 million downloads last month, while Firefox had 553,000 downloads.
In addition to this, Brave is also the default browser in major smartphone manufacturer HTC’s blockchain phone “HTC Exodus 1.”
This "turned out" blockchain browser has a very famous background. The founder, Brendan Eich, is not only the father of Java Script, but also the co-founder of Mozilla Foundation and Firefox browser. Brendan Eich's emphasis on privacy runs through his entrepreneurial career. Compared with Chrome or Safari, the Firefox browser co-created by Brendan many years ago is characterized by its emphasis on the protection of personal privacy and data security: Firefox is still a rare browser. browsers that can completely clear cookies.
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Brendan Eich
Privacy and Advertising
Currently, Google's Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world, according to Statista, with an estimated global market share of over 66% as of April 2018.
For the most part, it's easy to see why Chrome dominates: it doesn't hog resources; has an attractive minimalist interface; and is customizable thanks to a web store with tens of thousands of extensions and themes .
But it's clear that Chrome's downside is that it's owned by Google, and that alone is enough to make quite a few people uneasy. After all, Google has access to all of our browsing information and activity through Chrome, and its goal is to learn as much about us as possible in order to provide personalized advertising.
The existence of Brave is aimed at the pain points of the current browser market, flaunting privacy and security.
Among the many reviews, Brave has built-in HTTPS Everywhere. This forces the website to default to an encrypted connection when the user visits it, keeping the user's clicks and other activities on the ISP (Internet Service Provider Internet Service Provider) private. That is, Brave neither views nor stores users' browsing data, but keeps it private on the user's device until the user deletes it, which also means that Brave does not sell user data to third parties.
On other browsers, by contrast, HTTPS Everywhere is an extension that users need to download manually, something that the average internet user probably won't do.
The best privacy feature of Brave is its private browsing mode. Standard private browsers (aka incognito browsing) do not keep your web activity or identity private from your ISP or the sites you visit, not even Google, instead these modes simply wipe Except for traces of browsing activity.
Brave's private browsing mode offers even more privacy. When you activate a private window in Brave, the window uses Tor (a computer application that can be used to mask an Internet user's IP address, allowing anonymous browsing) to mask your IP address.
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Comparison between Google and Brave pages, the black screen on the left is a loading dynamic advertisement
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Attention economy tokenization
On Brave's official website, "You are not a product" is the biggest slogan, which is also applied in Brave's token incentive mechanism, and users' attention is the token.
In April, Brave launched Brave Ads, an option for users to be rewarded for viewing ads. In Brave's vision, this is a platform that protects users' data rights and rewards their attention; in addition, this is also a win-win platform for online advertisers, aiming to improve the economic benefits and conversion rates of the online advertising industry, and achieve efficient Accurate advertising dissemination will increase the income of content producers, and users will also get better access speed and better privacy and security protection.
Users from PC and Android (ISO is not open yet) can choose to watch advertisements based on privacy protection. In return, Brave Rewards will reward the user with a corresponding number of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) according to the user's attention. The reward amount 70% of advertising revenue.
Of course, the choice is free, users can choose how many ads they want to see (1 to 5 per hour) or choose not to watch any ads; ads are also accurately released, it is local research and abstraction of user data through machine learning, Building a ledger system that anonymously measures user attention for ad matching.
It is worth noting that joining Brave Rewards will not affect the blocking settings when you visit the website, so the advertisement is different from the embedded advertisement in the traditional website, and it is displayed separately from the browsing experience.
BAT has a variety of uses, and the BAT earned can be claimed and sold on digital currency exchanges through the integrated wallet in Brave every month. Currently, BAT has been listed on Binance, and the trading pairs include USDC, PAX, TUSD, etc. As of press time, the market value of BAT currency is about 230 million, and the price is 0.17 US dollars.
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Reward page
This kind of use also attracts content producers virtually. BATGrowth monitoring data shows that the number of content providers using the blockchain browser Brave has increased by 1,200% in the past year. In July 2018, the number of content providers using the Brave browser incentive program exceeded 230,000. Among these content providers are 29,278 website content providers (including The Washington Post), 17,417 Twitter content providers, 2,917 Reddit content providers, 166,698 YouTube content providers, and more than 12,000 Twitch content providers.
In September this year, Brave announced that it will update the recommendation system reward policy. The updated recommendation reward will change from the original global unified BAT token worth $5 to variable rewards based on different countries and regions.
According to the email sent by Brave to users, the new reward policy will come into effect on December 1, 2019, and it will be divided into 5 levels. Among them, the first level rewards BAT tokens equivalent to $7.5, and the second level rewards $6.5 worth of BAT tokens, tiers 3, 4, and 5 are rewards of BAT tokens worth $5, $2, and $1, respectively. Among them, there is only one country in the first layer, namely the United States; the second layer includes Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom; China belongs to the fifth layer (not included in other countries) tier country or region).
However, this update has sparked controversy in the Brave community, which is considered to be biased against people from different countries and regions. Brave product manager Alex Wykoff replied that this update is based on commercial considerations and aims to focus on geographically differentiated growth.
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successor
Brave inspired the latecomers.
Similar to Brave's blockchain browser, there is Singapore's Boogle.
According to previous interviews with Odaily, Boogle logs in anonymously through the built-in virtual private network channel encryption technology when using it, does not store the user's IP address, and does not require the user to register an email address and contact number.
Compared with Brave, the Boogle system is more "block chained", not only using a tokenized incentive mechanism, but also storing it as a decentralized storage. The data crawled by crawlers will be stored on the Boogle blockchain and run by miners (users) through hard disk mining. In order to avoid the lack of computing power of miners, Boogle also built its own data center and mine to improve computing power.
However, the efficiency of this decentralized processing method has yet to be considered. According to the Boogle team, the current search response time is as fast as 8 milliseconds.
In terms of incentives, users can get their token Boo (Baoge Coin) for searching and clicking on advertisements, but users only get 10% of the amount paid by advertisers in the end, Boogle itself gets 15%, and the remaining 75% of the tokens will be be destroyed.
Additionally, in August this year, IBM has filed for a patent for a blockchain-based web browser, according to documents published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In the filing, IBM argued for keeping a record of browser events on the blockchain, giving users more control over their privacy.
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Can Brave's good model last?
In fact, for the Internet, the incentive system brought by Brave is bold, and it retains the advantages of online advertising, which is the largest source of income for websites and online services. At the same time, unlike giants such as Facebook and Google, whose ad targeting policies are based on the use of users' personal data, Brave's ads cater to people's growing need for privacy, as evidenced by its rising ranking in the app store.
For the blockchain, the existence of Brave is the best billboard for digital currency. It proves the effectiveness of blockchain token incentives, lowers the threshold for the general public to obtain digital currency, and has the potential to attract Internet users. Endless potential.
But can Brave break through the browser market surrounded by giants?
The answer may be that it is still difficult. According to the Insight research report, as of the beginning of April 2019, the monthly compound growth rate of the Brave browser dropped sharply over the same period, from 13.6% in the first to third quarters of 2018 to 3.4%. From the perspective of scale growth, the current market performance of the Brave browser has gradually shown signs of reaching the ceiling of the early stage of rapid development. In fact, the browser market is not a "good target" for the blockchain. The original products of the Internet, the stock market of browsers is running out. Emerging browsers represented by Brave have a higher demand for testing the water. If you want to further expand the scale, you must leverage Google's "corner". Due to user habits, it is obviously difficult.
As for the new advertising profit model created by Brave, it also has a "utopian" atmosphere. The incentive model of tokens may not stimulate users' interest in advertising. On the one hand, user education needs to be improved, and the number of user samples who join Brave Ads is not large enough, so the advertising market value reflected by it cannot be compared with the plug-in advertisements in current browsers. If you pay a sufficiently attractive fee, then the user will have less wool to pluck; in addition, current browsers generally have the plug-in option of "Block Ads", so "Brave Ads" has no advantage at all.
At present, the BAT price has dropped by 300% compared to the highest point of $0.83. Although the transaction volume is acceptable, compared with the currency holders, the per capita transaction volume of users is still sluggish. According to the research of Insight Research Institute, the current ATVPU (Average Transaction Volume Per User, 30MA) is about 47% lower than the historical average.
In addition, even though a large-scale increase in the number of content providers has been achieved, this is not the whole of Brave. How to improve the attractiveness of content to users and increase the enthusiasm of users to interact with content providers/advertisers is still the next stage of becoming Brave. Operational focus.
All of the above are based on the follow-up development of Brave. However, some users joked that "the most important thing is that Brandon, an old guy, likes to make a product and sell it. No shyness, Brave Langdon just wanted to make BAT and sell it to Google."
