For the past 2 weeks I’ve been enthusiastically advocating Brave- the privacy oriented browser that blocks ads, protects your privacy and data, and makes internet surfing much faster in the process. What makes Brave exceptional is that fact that users can earn the crypto (BAT) by viewing ads and also tip their favorite creators. The browser is extremely well designed and executed, however there is a significant interaction problem for those who chose to earn BAT cryptocurrency by viewing ads..

..the ad serving mechanism.

In theory this looks fine, but in practice it negative affects users as it obtrusively interrupts, distracts and further attacks our ability to concentrate in a world constantly grinding away at our attention span. The ads are also persistent and require the user to dismiss them manually, adding another layer of interruption.

Although users can chose the ad frequency, people who want to earn the most are incentivized to chose the maximum of 5 ads per hour, which means they would be interrupted every ~12 minutes with ads that may or may not be relevant. This is not ok.

Possible Solution

Serving ads tactfully is a bit paradoxical: get a user’s attention without distracting them. Perhaps instead of annoying pop ups, Brave can render ads in-line inside of webpages like so: