Brendan Eich reinvented the web. Now he wants to upend the advertising industry.
Eich created JavaScript, the world's most widely used programming language. As the co-founder of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, he helped end Microsoft Internet Explorer's reign as the world's most popular way to navigate the web.
Now he hopes to shake things up with Brave, a startup developing a browser for desktop and mobile that blocks ads and replaces them with, well, other ads. If successful, Brave could essentially flip the traditional advertising model on its head. Instead of paying publishers or advertising networks, advertisers will pay the browser maker.
The big idea is to block advertisements and tracking scripts that pillage your personal data and replace them with ads supplied by the browser—--ads that respect your privacy and don't slow your computer to a crawl or tax your phone's battery. According to the plan, a cut of the advertising revenue will go to the site owners and to users themselves. Brave hopes to be able to pay publishers 55 percent of the revenue generated by an ad, which he says should be more than they make from a typical advertising network. The company would pay its own advertising network partners 15 percent and keep 15 percent for itself. The remaining 15 percent would go back to users, and the company plans to implement some sort of screening process to ensure that real people, not bots, are doing the surfing.
Eventually, the company hopes to let users pay to opt out of ads altogether. If the model works, the company hopes its technologies will become standards that other browsers use to protect privacy.
Ideally, Brave will spur a transfer of power on the web back to the users. If you can pick and choose from among several browsers, you're likely to choose the one that best respects your privacy. The trouble with the way online advertising works now is you don't really know what sort of policies an advertising network has regarding the data it collects when you visit a page. Unless you disable JavaScript, you're essentially opting in to whatever policies an ad network has in place as soon as you load a page. "So we invert this power structure and have the browser be an important part of the system instead of this passive window," Eich says. The question is whether users—and advertisers—will be motivated enough to buy in.
Eich co-founded Brave Software with former Khan Academy and Mozilla software developer Brian Bondy last year after stepping down as Mozilla's CEO in 2014 amid an uproar over donations he made in support of California's same-sex marriage ban. The epiphany that prompted the creation of a new browser, he tells WIRED, came when he realized that advertising as a business model for websites was here to stay. "Most people aren't ready to pay for their content," he says. "Some aren't well off enough to pay for subscriptions, some don't know how or don't want to trust their credit card to a paywall." But he also acknowledges that the deluge of resource-hogging banners and pop-ups on ad-supported sites understandably lead users to demand ways of blocking them. The problem, Eich says, is that the current crop of ad blockers are openly antagonistic toward sites' survival.
"They feel like free-riding, or even starting a war," Eich wrote in a post announcing Brave's browser. "You may never click on an ad, but even forming an impression from a viewable ad has some small value. With enough people blocking ads, the Web’s main funding model is in jeopardy."
Users are stuck between wanting to support the sites they love and wanting to be free of excessive advertising and privacy violating tracking scripts. With the Brave browser, Eich and company hope to find middle ground. The idea is to let those who don't want to see ads support sites through donations and let everyone else support sites by viewing ads that are more relevant, less intrusive, and not so creepy. Since a web browser sees everything you do, it can make well informed predictions about what you might be interested in. Brave Software claims any data it shares will be anonymized and will not be shared without you first opting in. "No data is sent out to our cloud," he says. "If you opt into storing data in our cloud, it will all be encrypted."
The Brave browser is entirely open source, meaning that anyone can inspect the code used to create it. Privacy advocates can audit the code to ensure Brave Software isn't taking any data that it's not supposed to.
But Brave's approach, and the company itself, are likely to stir debate. Eich is still haunted by the Prop 8 controversy, and trying to make money while meddling with other companies' advertisements has historically been contentious. "It seems to me that they are really asking for litigation at that point," says Harvard Business School associate professor Benjamin G. Edelman. He points to Gator, a piece of adware that was bundled with other applications and that replaced banner ads in users' web browsers with its own advertisements.
The company behind Gator was sued in 2002 by publishers such as The New York Times and Dow Jones. It settled out of court and had to change its business model. More recently, Adblock Plus, which allows advertisers to pay to be whitelisted, was disinvited from a major advertising conference. And "read-it-later" service Readability ultimately abandoned a scheme to collect donations on behalf of publishers, even if the publishers never actually opted in, after the program was widely panned.
But Brave stands a better chance of prevailing, Edelman says. Unless Brave starts paying other software makers to install its browsers on people's phones and computers, he says, it will be in a very different category than Gator, which was usually installed without users' knowledge.
Eich himself believes the company is on solid legal ground, saying that other companies that have done client-side content modifications have won in court. "There's going to be some uncertainty up front because we're doing something radical," he says. "But we're ready to fight for this because it's an important battle."
Jason Kint, CEO of the online publishers association Digital Content Next believes publishers could well be interested in Brave, depending on how its advertising is implemented. He says publishers are worried about ad-blocking, and that anything that could help solve the problem to the satisfaction of both consumers and publishers will be a welcome development. "I think there's going to be more and more of these sorts of companies," he says. "It's good, the market chasing the market."
But will Brave's advertising model actually work? Ads have become more intrusive and advertising firms collect ever-increasing amounts of personal data based on the belief that people have become so accustomed to seeing ads that they've developed "banner blindness." Chris Tuff, director of business development at advertising agency 22squared, worries that Brave's model might not be radical enough. "Display advertising is a horrible format for mobile," he says. "Fifty percent of mobile clicks are done by mistake."
The other issue Tuff points out is that although some users guard their privacy jealously, most people have already accepted the idea of forking over their personal data to companies like Google and Facebook. The real reason people hate ads, he says, is not that they're creepy but that all too often ads are annoying and irrelevant. Like many others in the industry, he believes that advertising's future lies in content that looks and feels just like articles or videos that you're already interested in viewing---what's come to be known as "native advertising."
One big advantage Brave will have is that it will be able to target ads based on a user's entire browser history without needing to share that information with advertisers. That could, in theory, lead to ads that are far more targeted than ever while protecting users' privacy—at least if anyone actually sees them. (Kint defends traditional banner advertising, saying that the term "banner blindness" is often used to describe a low click-rate on an ad, even if lots of people notice the ad and it helps build brand awareness for the advertiser.)
All of these concerns could be moot, however, if Brave isn't able to convince a large number of users to actually use its browsers. That could be difficult, given that it has to woo people from the browsers pre-installed on their computers, phones and tablets. Sure, Google Chrome pulled off that fat, but Google has the advantage of being able to advertise its web browser on its search engine. Brave is going to have to depend, at least initially, on word of mouth.
But that's not a bad plan, says Aodhan Cullen, the CEO of web analytics company StatCounter, which tracks the market share of various browsers. "Firefox started taking share from [Microsoft Internet Explorer] before Chrome came along by offering multitab browsing and other features that people wanted," he says. "Mozilla didn't have a large marketing budget, at least at first." And the demand is there, Cullen says, for a browser that can help users support the sites they like without being bombarded by advertisements.
And Brave does have a little bit of money to work with, as well as tech talent. The company raised a $2.5 million in funding in November, Morningstar reports, and has a full staff of developers and managers, including Yan Zhu, an engineer well known in security circles for her work on privacy-centric software such as HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, and End-to-End.
Brave hasn't released its final product to the public just yet, but the company has posted the source code for the new browser this week. If you want to use it today, you'll either need an invite, or get your hands dirty installing the application from the code itself. Its success may be a long shot, but if anyone has reason to believe a few individuals can bring massive change to the web, it's Eich, who's already helped do it twice.
