As a blogger and Web Developer, the Brave browser has really piqued my interest. I love the potential for anyone with an internet connection to be rewarded directly by their audience without having to deface their beautifully designed website with adverts.

Also having Brendan Eich behind the project adds validation in a crypto world full of charlatans peddling snake oil.

As a consequence of aiming to fix the internet’s broken advertising model am hoping Brave will, therefore, help fight one of my personal pet peeves on the web, clickbait.

Obviously clickbait won’t instantly vanish as we use Brave to surf the web, but as adoption increases it’ll make clickbait less viable as adverts get blocked.

Maybe it’ll just lead to a surge in better written clickbait, but atleast we can choose not to send any BAT to those sites and I’ll bet we’ll see some community led white and blacklists in the future to help protect against auto tipping certain clickbait sites.

Another little pet peeve of mine, that Brave may potentially assist with, is something that has happened to me a lot when I worked as a freelancer.

Under-budgeting and over-developing I’ll bet pretty much every freelancer has suffered this, charging for too few hours having underestimated the project, in most cases for me it was due to the lack of a clear/concise spec. Specifications take time to compile and that isn’t always feasible for the small-sized clients, my default client type as a soletrader.

I’ve finished numerous projects feeling disgruntled at the time I’ve spent, quickly cutting ties with the clients after the final invoice is paid unable to cope with any further work without adequate compensation for my time and effort.

This was always a shame as I knew the systems well and was a lot speedier making minor adjustments than someone fresh to the project.

Also I can’t be alone in my desire to see each site I work on suceed and wishing to be a key part of that success.

So with a potential revenue stream that could grow after the initial project build, where user’s pay what they want only by visiting the finished site, there is more motivation for the team to continue working on projects to push onward and make great web projects rather than adequate projects constrained by the initial budget.

Yes, this arrangement could be achieved using the current ad systems, but I’m very confident the revenue stream will be higher from having a ‘pay what you want’ system rather than relying on ad impressions. Also , the current ad system, in my experience, relies on the content to attract clickable ads whereas bat tokens could be rewarded for the great copy and/or the ‘slick site’ experience. Bat could really validate the UX of a webapp.

By the content creator(s) and developer(s) sharing the BAT revenue or setting an agreement on who receives how much for how long, both parties can be compensated for their ongoing work motivated to improve the site experience/build/content to pull in more happy brave browser users.

It could be how future projects get built, maybe even opening up the market of web developers to the cash strapped talented content creators.

From a recent UX talk I attended, the one big take home for me was actually the following quote -

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

- Maya Angelou I think those wise words will become extremely relevant for Web developers and site owners in the coming years if we see the brave browser system really flourish.

I feckin well hope so!