A site that is all too familiar. See what I did there. There is certainly a disharmony between content and ads. Platforms are trying harder than ever to grab our attention. We clearly hate seeing ads, many of us have ad blockers and would even pay to remove ads with Netflix being the shining $130 billion example. So why do platforms keep pummelling us with them? After all only 2% of us click on these ads yet 100% have to deal with an annoying online experience. The model is clearly broken from both the perspectives of the advertiser and the user. Here is why:

Current Mechanism

Who benefits from this? Well, it’s the middleman. Google & Facebook are making some serious cash facilitating this disjointed transaction. To figure out a solution we can take a leaf out of the late Steve Jobs’ philosophy where we design an optimum user experience and work backwards from there. Our demands are rather simple- no ads and full data ownership. In reality, this is too extreme as no ads means there would be no way to pay the content creators and our most loved sites would cease to exist. Ads need to exists, it is the way in which they are fed to us which has to change.

Firstly, there needs to be a clear separation between ads and content, this alone would give us the enjoyable browsing experience we’ve all been longing for. Secondly, we need to be incentivised to view ads. Here is where we introduce the future.

Welcome, Brave. A new web browser brought to you by the co-founder of Mozilla which aims to enhance your browsing experience by reducing the power that the middleman holds. Remember that $82 ad spend on every internet user? Imagine if this figure was put right into your pocket. This is no longer a fantasy but a reality. Through the use of Blockchain technologies we can now facilitate true peer to peer transactions. The implications of this are huge. Here is what life with Brave looks like:

Brave Mechanism

A no-brainer right? It is time to bring the power back in the hands of the user. Brave is real and ready to use right now. I will let the experience speak for itself. Over and out!