Why don't I see any ads after enabling them?

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055013431-Why-don-t-I-see-any-Brave-Ads-after-enabling-them-

by jamesdwilson • 4 years ago

34 31 4 years ago

support.brave.com

"Brave discourages using VPNs for the purpose of downloading ad catalogs from other countries. Doing so may increase the chances of being flagged as suspect, and result in issues with claiming tokens on the payment date."

As far as I know, this is something that happens automatically without user intervention, and I don't see any settings or buttons to push related to this.

Therefore, if you use a VPN while using Brave, you might be flagged as "suspect."

Is this why even though they partnered with Guardian to provide VPN services for iOS in 2020 [1] they have yet to provide desktop support?

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[1] https://brave.com/brave-and-guardian/

rglullis6• 4 years ago

I don't see any settings or buttons to push related to this.

Yes, there is. Just don't turn on the ad rewards.

The ad matching is anonymized, so it can't really tell where jamesdwilson is really connecting from. All it can know is that there is one device that connected from one place but wants to claim that is has seen an ad intended for another country.

Imagine if you are responsible for the "ad confirmation" service and your job is to ensure that there is no abuse of the ad delivery. Do you think it would be okay for it to issue the ad confirmation to your device? How would you design a system that could avoid fake viewers?

jamesdwilson6• 4 years ago

Okay, so to be clear, you're saying if I want to use a VPN that I cannot and should not expect BAT rewards to work.

autoexec• 4 years ago

Surveillance capitalism and privacy will always be at odds.

account-52• 4 years ago

Without being facesious just don't use Brave. If I was going to use anything other than Firefox it would probably Vivaldi.

jamesdwilson6• 4 years ago

Even though it isn't entirely open source?

account-52• 4 years ago

Opera used to be an amazing browser that wasn't open source. I view Vivaldi in a similar manner.

ketz1• 4 years ago

Fuck ads anyway

FrenchDevRemote• 4 years ago

Misleading title. They don't want you to use a VPN if you plan on watching ads to earn money, which is widely accepted as the norm, and absolutely necessary to fight ad fraud.

It's way too easy to fire up 1000's of cloud instances with brave browsers watching ads automatically all day.

If you don't care about earning a few bucks a months then use a vpn.

rglullis6• 4 years ago

Don't understand why you are being downvoted. Your answer describes the issue perfectly.

baal80spam• 4 years ago

For some reason (I suspect why, but I won't go in there), Brave doesn't have good opinion here.

I am a happy Brave user for the last 5 years. FF is my backup browser but I tend to find the need to use it less and less.

dang• 4 years ago

The submitted title was "Tell HN: Brave doesn't want you to use a VPN". Then the submitter changed it to "[Ignore this]".

Submitters: please don't do either of those things! Both are against the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Barrin922• 4 years ago

I don't understand the recent Brave hype to be honest. Shut third party ad and data companies out, try to capture the entire stack, with some BAT tokens slapped on top to monetize. It's like the crypto street-dealer version of Apple.

rglullis6• 4 years ago

try to capture the entire stack, with some crypto stuff slapped on top to monetize

No. The last part of your sentence is what stops them from being able to do the first.

There is absolutely nothing stopping any competitor to set a different ad network that also uses BAT as the payout. There is nothing stopping Facebook (or any other media company actually) to start accepting BAT for payments.

Barrin922• 4 years ago

there's nothing stopping anyone from taking dollars, what does that have to do with brave's business model? When you use the brave browser, brave takes a share of publishers ad revenue in the bat program, just like Google or Apple do, and publishers who want to participate have to agree with the terms and conditions set by, you'll never guess it, the Brave developers. Whether Apple, Google or Brave pay you in dollars, bitcoin, BAT or sheepskin changes nothing about the fact that they all attempt to generate value by taking control of the distribution channel.

The difference of course being that Google and Apple at least pay you well and in dollars rather than a crypto token that has been premined by the company that also happens to run the browser and in reality isn't going to be adopted outside of the Brave ecosystem. Imagine if Amazon started to pay its vendors in Amazon gift cards, that's what Brave is. (everyone is free to accept amazon gift cards, of course!)

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

Clickbaity title, it implies that the browser itself somehow doesn’t want users to use VPN. That’s untrue.

This is just about Brave Ads, an optional component some users opt in to. VPNs are used for ad fraud and may reduce traffic quality, so it’s understandable that they turn off ads for some VPN users.

I’ve been using Brave for over a year and always use VPN.

jamesdwilson6• 4 years ago

Thanks, I am new to Brave and saw it in their docs and was alarmed.

pseudo02• 4 years ago

Clickbait editorialized title, and their system seems pretty reasonable. If they suspect someone is farming BAT (eg. using a bunch of VMs with different VPN endpoints to look like separate users) they simply won't show those "suspect" users any more ads.

Also, I used Brave for a few months with a VPN enabled and had no issues with ads or redeeming BAT, so it clearly is just one factor they take into consideration when looking for ad fraud.

jamesdwilson6• 4 years ago

Apologies if it was clickbaity, I did use literal quotes from their own docs. I am a new user to Brave and their docs is all I have to go on.

pseudo02• 4 years ago

The page title was: "Why don't I see any Brave Ads after enabling them?"

The Brave ads are entirely optional, requiring user opt-in, and it is hard to criticize them for defaulting to not showing ads if they suspect the user is fake. Their advertisers pay to show their ads to real users, not headless browsers in a data center.

omgmajk• 4 years ago

I tried switching to brave for a bit and even signed up for their ad program, but it's a pretty infuriating experience overall.

finite_jest2• 4 years ago

Come on, what kind of clickbait is that? So Brave has an opt-in option to see ads [1], and they have some measures to protect against fraud. They are simply being honest about the fact that using a VPN would increase the chance of being marked as suspicious for the purpose of paying you to see ads.

This is HN, and one might hope we can do better than BuzzFeed. In fact, Brave probably would want you to use a VPN, they sell their own VPN service after all [2].

[1] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026648512-How...

[2] https://brave.com/firewall-vpn/

jamesdwilson6• 4 years ago

Why don't they offer VPN on their desktop product after 2 years?

Arnt• 4 years ago

Do you mean that they don't offer an option to route all your web traffic via their servers?

Do you think that this is something browser vendors should do, ie. that the absence of the feature is something that must be explained?

finite_jest2• 4 years ago

I don't know, but Brendan Eich (Brave's CEO) [1] is pretty active on Twitter, and I think he used to answer the questions people asked. You could try asking him there. Let us know if you get an answer.

Also, I apologize for being a little bit too harsh in my previous comment.

[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich

rglullis6• 4 years ago

Because 99.99% of the population don't really need a VPN on their browser: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

Why don't I see any ads after enabling them?

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