Brave/BAT Community Call - April 4th, 2023

Every Tuesday at 5 pm ET via Brave Talk. 

A free POAP can be obtained each week by attending the call live.

Featuring:

• Luke Mulks - VP of Business Ops
• Nikki B. - Ops/Partnerships
• Jennie - Director of Community & Partnerships
• Drew - Community Team
• Carlos Acevedo - Sr. Director, Sales
• James Mudgett - Wallet Team

Recording:

General News:

• BRAVE SELF-SERVE ADS PROGRAM: Launched on 4/4/2023 
  • Brave announces the Self-Serve Ads Program, enabling brands to easily run ad campaigns with Brave. Since launch in 2019, Brave Ads has grown significantly, with over 6,600 campaigns from brands such as Ford, American Express, and Coinbase. Now, Brave opens the door for more businesses of all sizes to reach audiences in a privacy-first way, lowering the minimum campaign spend to $1,000 USD per month.
  • The Self-Serve Program currently offers brands the ability to purchase campaigns that run via Brave's Push Notification ad unit. Over time, the team will be introducing Brave News Ads and Brave Search Ads units to self-serve program.
  • Advertisers enrolled in the Self-Serve Program are eligible for a 50% discount on their first campaign if they purchase it with BAT. Additional discounts for purchasing campaigns with BAT will be available throughout the program!
  • Brands can sign up here: https://brave.com/brave-ads/self-serve/
  • Official blogpost for more info: https://brave.com/self-serve-ads/
• BRAVE WALLET:
  • There's been a refresh to the wallet's interface in Brave Nightly.
  • In Nightly, IPFS pinning abilities and some ETH, Solana, & Polygon NFT automatic discovery capabilities have been added.
  • Some NFTs don't show up because the NFT spam flagging system isn't fully calibrated yet.
  • A lot of progress and continued effort is being made on the Wallet's offerings to improve user retention.

BAT Community:

• x50 Iron Paw Gang WL were given away to BAT x Adam Ape Sage Hunters. The mint was April 4th, 2023 and the Collection has already sold out! Congratulations to all our Sage Hunters who successfully minted IPG NFT! https://twitter.com/IronPawGang/status/1643360278602477568
• NFT NYC 2023 is April 12-14. Brave won't have a booth this year, but some team members will be there at some events. Nikki will try to get some extra tickets for the Famous Fox Federation event for the Community. https://www.nft.nyc/
• Brave is sponsoring Talent Land Networking Summit on April 10-14 in Jalisco, Mexico for entrepreneurs & talents from different industries such as Tech, Blockchain, AI, Gaming, and Food & Health. Brave will have a booth there and Carlos Acevedo will make a presentation about how Brave is trying to redefine our relationship with the web. 3 tickets (value of ~$200 USD each) will be raffled in the BAT Brigade Discord server: 1 among the BAT x Adam Ape holders & the other 2 among all the BAT Brigade members. 
• Super High Stake 1000 $BAT Meme contest winner has been announced! Congratulations JimmyZ for winning the grand prize with your fictional Netflix trailer featuring the BAT Brigade Pelican Mascot. His feature tells the dramatic story of a Pelican trying to recover its stolen BAT. Honorable mentions were also named and won 30 BAT each! All entries can be found here.

Q&A:

Q: Is self-serve available in all regions?

A: Yes, it will be available in any region where Brave Ads are eligible for serving. At the moment, it's limited to English language in every country served because most of our team only speaks English and all the Self-Serve documentation needs to be translated. Other languages support is coming.

Q: Does Brave already have some Self-Serve Ads lined-up? When can we expect for the first Self-Serve Ads to go out?

A: There are already a good amount of submissions through the sign up link in the first few hours of it being live. The team is curating those and will onboard groups of advertisers every week. Brave also has a big list of advertisers that were interested in Self-Serve that have previously purchased Ads via the Sales Team in the past. We plan to reach out to them and make sure they are aware that Self-Serve is an option. The Team will be running house ads to let people know about the Program. We hope to bring in a broader audience of advertisers given the entry price has been lowered to $1000 USD/month.  

Q: Will self-serve increase Brave Rewards payouts?

A: The team expects it will have a positive, above-average impact.  

Q: What differentiates the Self-Serve Ads model from the regular Brave Ads Managed Services (ads directly sold by the Ad Sales Team)?

A: Through Managed Services, advertisers can buy Takeovers (formerly called New Tab Sponsored Images), which aren't purchasable with Self-Serve Ads due to the curated image selection and approval process. Advertisers also have a direct line with the Ad Sales Team that can help them with optimizing their ad campaign and provide additional support. Thus, Managed Services are more intended for the higher dollar customers. Self-Serve Ads are more geared towards smaller and mid-size businesses, but also allow more control over some parameters of an ad campaign.  

Q: The Self-Serve blog post mentioned "brands." What is it referring to exactly? Can anyone with $1000 USD advertise on Brave?

A: Yes, any small business that has a legal registered address can use Self-Serve. Note: Brave's existing restrictions on ad content presumably still apply, i.e. no political and no pharmaceutical ads.
 

Q: Any ETA on when the other Brave Ad products will be available in the Self-Serve platform?

A: Team is aiming to release everything by the end of the year. By then it will be something Brave can market aggressively & open up to other languages beyond English.  

Q: Does the team plan to implement ENS Domains, ETH & SOL names into the Brave Wallet for use in signing into different dApps? ...And also something like mailchain to send & receive messages between wallets?

A: ENS Domains are supported already along with SNS & Unstoppable Domains in the NFT section. But the team likes the idea to do something similar to Web2 Gravatar where the user could set up an NFT and have it applied to all their Web3 accounts.  

Q: Can Brave implement Yubikey support?

A: There is already an open issue on this, but Brave doesn't have the resources to do so yet. But everything 2FA is top of mind.  

Q: Is Brave planning to create a separate app for Brave Wallet in the future?

A: The team considered the option very early on, but Brave is aiming at being THE super app that does everything, aka the Wallet, the Browser, the Search Engine. Now with Playlist coming out soon and with Brave News taking off, Brave is at a point where they can consider to connect and make all these products work together. It's also interesting to see the trend of some wallet providers introducing browser functionality in their products, such as Uniswap.  

Q: Could the team implement the ability to add multiple seeds to the Brave Wallet without changing the browser profile? Several people expressed the need to use one wallet for business and another one for personal activities. The only current way to do that is to use different browser profiles.

A: It'd make sense to have multiple seeds supported within the wallet. Other wallets such as Trustwallet do so. It's been brought up during a recent product design call. It'd just require a bit more user research on the Team's end. It's a big lift and won't come out in the following months, unless the demand from users increases significantly. But it'll come out at some point, it's only a matter of time.  

Q: Does Brave have any back up plans if VPNs become illegal in USA? (New USA Restrict Act)

A: Luke doesn't think it'll get that far. But if something like that were to happen: US represent 30 to 35% of Brave userbase and the VPN could still be operating outside of the US. Hopefully it won't get that far, but we'll see how it goes.  

Q: We can see on the brave.photos (a sponsored image unofficial archive) that some big brands like Adobe, Range Rover & BMW advertised through this sponsored image ads in Japan. Any feedback from these companies? https://brave.photos/

A: Luke doesn't have specific feedback from these brands. The Japan Team has been working on building the ad business there & they did a really good job onboarding some big clients. In Japan, there are a lot of users on iPhone & features like Playlist, which first launched on iOS have been marketed aggressively. Playlist allows users to save bandwidth and the feature took off really well. So Brave Ads in Japan are doing good so far! On the growth side, Brave is looking at what is working well in Japan and how it can be applied elsewhere. Playlist should be landing on Android in May. Brave could use the same marketing strategy used in Japan in other countries that could benefit from offline playback of videos to save bandwidth and market aggressively. Campaigns are being worked on for Q2 & Q3 in the USA.  

Q: Any update on new custodial wallet partners? For instance, for Germany?

A: Still doing meetings with potential partners and trying to get it out as soon as possible. One partner that would cover Europe and another one for India. But nothing material yet.  

Q: Any update on the sunsetting of vBAT or on adding more countries back to Uphold?

A: Nothing concrete yet. But Team had a great call with Uphold last week. No ETA for sunsetting yet.  

Upcoming Events:

• BAT Brigade Weekly Trivia will be this Friday April 14th, 2023 at 2:00 pm ET. The event occurs in the Event section of the BAT Brigade Discord server. Participants can win sBAT for correctly answering question. There is also often some BAT given out to community members just for participating.
• BAT Community Twitter Space is happening this Friday, April 14th, 2023 at 1:00 PM with Rollbit.
• JackBox Party Weekend games on Saturday, April 15th from 10 am to 12 pm ET. Winners will win sBAT. If interested in participating, then go to the BAT Brigade Discord server for more information.

Get Involved, Stay Connected:

For more on everything BAT, join the BAT Brigade and consider joining our weekly Community Calls and Twitter Spaces.

Consider following Bauzz on Twitter for more on everything Brave and BAT, including memes.

Acknowledgement:

Special thanks to the BAT Ambassador Belladone for providing me with written permission to share and incorporate their summary of the community call into this post. Summarized by Belladone & edited by Bauzz. This blog post is considered a combined effort by the BAT Ambassador group to keep the public informed on Brave and the Brave/BAT Community.