The Brave approach seems to be the same as the infamous Adblock Plus, i.e. insert themselves as a middle-man between websites & ad networks on the one side and the user on the other and under the guise of "ethical ad blocking" extract a ransom.
That doesn't make it more ethical. Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already.
In any case, Brave's effective CPM that they pay out to publishers it complete shit even compared to bottom-of-the-barrel ad exchanges. It's objectively a bad deal for publishers.
> Presumably if the sites wanted to operate under that model they would be already.
Not if the economics don't work out. I earnestly thing the Internet would be vastly different if microtransactions were feasible 20 years ago. I was hoping Paypal would enable this because credit card companies seemed to have no interest since their per-transaction fees are so profitable.
>There is no easy way to set up an own advertising network for every website
Huh? This is trivially easy with DFP or if you're smaller AdGlare/AdZerk/etc
> You will find that everyone except google has terrible CPMs.
This is objectively false. OpenX, Amazon, Rubicon, AppNexus, Pubmatic, etc all pay better than Google for large pockets of inventory. Google has the largest distribution, but their CPMs are awful for a very large percentage of that inventory, even in typically high-CPM markets.
It might be trivially easy for you, as you seem to have experience, but I don’t think it’s easy for your average joe who wants to set up a blog, local news site, forum, etc.
I don’t think either Brave or a custom advertising solution are unethical. It just seems like the barrier to entry to getting your own advertising solution up is a lot higher than setting up a site on squarespace, and that most small site owners can’t roll their own advertising solution.
setup DFP and find advertisers where? The ad networks you mention either exclude 95% of websites or pay worse than adsense for long-tail websites. You can find testimonials about them in tons of sites
You're absolutely right that they aren't a feasible option for long-tail sites (as you mention, most of the time you won't even get approved). However, long-tail sites don't monetize poorly because Google is screwing them. Long-tail sites monetize poorly because because the value of the content on long-tail sites isn't worth the Trust & Safety overhead for anyone except for Google.
