CoinDesk, a New York-based bitcoin and blockchain industry media company, has partnered with privacy-focused browser company Brave Software to phase out third-party banner advertisements from its website in 2017 and promote the innovative Brave browser to its audience.



With this partnership, CoinDesk becomes the first premium publisher to commit to the Brave model. By removing third-party ads and trackers from the browsing experience, Brave users can save hours of time per year with faster loading pages. Brave provides a 40% to 60% speed increase on the desktop, and a 2x to 4x speed increase on mobile devices, along with a direct reduction in both battery and data plan consumption.



"We're excited to partner with CoinDesk to reform the ad-tech ecosystem. Brave Payments gives browser users and website content creators the fair deal they deserve with ownership of their data," said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave Software. "Now users have a new and private way to support CoinDesk and its high-quality content, while enjoying a clean browsing experience free of third-party intermediaries that clog Web pages with invasive ads, trackers, and sometimes even malware."



CoinDesk aims to evaluate new revenue models with Brave that provide brand advertisers with significant returns on their investment while also providing users with a faster, cleaner, and more private experience. By using the Brave browser, people can opt to automatically and privately support CoinDesk content via Brave Payments' bitcoin-based micro-donation system.



With Brave Payments, people can now choose to support CoinDesk in exchange for an ad-free experience with no behavioral tracking and profiling by third parties, not even by Brave or CoinDesk. Brave Payments allows users to fund a Brave wallet with bitcoin and select a monthly browsing "budget" to send to various sites. It then automatically pro-rates payments to sites based on the user's traffic or manually selected preferences.



"We believe stripping out low-yield, low-quality ads is in the best interest of CoinDesk as well as our users," said Ryan Selkis, Managing Director of CoinDesk. "With Brave, we're taking a calculated risk that users will value the gains in privacy, speed and security to the point they'll consider using small amounts of bitcoin to fund their monthly digital media consumption."



According to the official release, the partnership signifies the first of several anticipated bitcoin business initiatives for CoinDesk in 2017. In particular, the company sees itself as a leading candidate to identify a pay-per-view micropayment model that actually works.