Brave Ads is a digital advertising platform powered by the brave browser. Though it is an advertising system, it works differently from current industry giants. By industry giants, I mean Google and Facebook because they dominate the digital advertising industry. Other small advertising networks generally copy Google’s model into their system.
The most common method these companies use is collecting sensitive user data and storing them in servers for future use. The data is used to serve ads relevant to the users. Let's learn a little about how data related to "user preferences" is collected.
The most important information about a user's tastes is his purchasing power, what products he generally buys, and what products he views or searches for in the web. If advertising platforms (Google, Facebook) collect these types of data, they can serve ads of similar products.
This will increase their profits because users are more likely to buy those products. Digital marketing agencies will dump more cash into marketing if more of their products are getting sold thereby increasing the revenue of advertising platforms.
Platforms like Google keep records of your search history, YouTube watch and search history etc to collect the valuable data they need to serve ads relevant to you. This of course is by default unless you have turned off activity to pause data google collects about you. You can prevent Google from collecting your data in Google - Activity Controls. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't give you any simplified interface to pause data collection.
The collected data is kept in centralized servers under a tracking id. When advertisers buy ads, the platform searches the database to find users with tastes relevant to the ad.
That’s fundamentally how digital advertising works. While it is true that Brave Ads also adheres to this fundamental, it introduces new technology for implementation of this principle. Instead of using servers to store data and serve ads, Brave uses a client side system that is tuned to better protect user privacy. Learn more about how Brave Ads work here.
The new system is still experimental and its success will depend on its reliability and ability to prevent fraud. Considering how advertising systems work, it is almost impossible to detect 100% of all fraudulent traffic. So, Brave doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to perform better than other industry giants to establish itself as a key player in the digital advertising market.
Brave’s tracking and ad matching happens in the browser. Hence, the responsibility of the data is on the user not Brave team. Since the matching is client side, the browser can track a lot of things such as mouse clicks, visited websites, visited pages, subscribed services and products the user brought online. It is important to note that all of these important datasets are never sent to Brave's servers.
The browser downloads a catalog of ads and keeps it in the client device. Then, it matches the ads with the user data stored in the device to serve relevant ads.
One big downside of this system is that advertisers would have a hard time tracking who is visiting their ads and where their ads are appearing. Advertisers may use click counters to track how many of their ads were clicked but it will be hard to get other engagement related stats.
This new system is unique and has gone live only a few months ago. There is not much data available for me to assess its effectiveness. The Brave team has hinted that it will likely be better than Google because it can track a lot more things. But it would be unreasonable to take their words at face value. It is in their interest to claim that their product will be better than existing products.
But from personal experience, I can confidently say that it is quite reliable. I have recently received ads related to VPNs and Civic Wallet. Both were fairly relevant to my preferences.
So, my conclusion is that, with its current capabilities, Brave Ads will become a promising choice for advertisers consider that it has over 5.5 million monthly active users. In a few years, it might even surpass the ad serving capabilities of Google and Facebook if it can continue to improve itself.
