View Ads, Get BAT: Brave Delivers on ICO Promise of Paid Web Browsing

Brave's promise to compensate you for viewing online ads is finally coming to fruition.

Users can still keep using Brave without any kind of ad intervention, but they do have an incentive to join: Brave promises that 70 percent of the money companies spend on these ads will go to users.

Brave Ads goes live today with a number of ad inventory suppliers, including Vice, Home Chef, ConsenSys, Ternio BlockCard, MyCrypto, eToro, BuySellAds, TAP Network, The Giving Block, AirSwap, Fluidity and Uphold.

To start earning BAT for letting these notifications pop up, users need to make sure they are using the latest version of Brave.

Brave's BAT offering was the original sold-out-in-seconds initial coin offering in 2017, selling $35 million in BAT less than a minute.

Brave first gave users a way to use BAT by letting them donate funds to websites based on how often they visited them.

Currently, Brave Rewards users either add funds themselves or accept grants from Brave, and the BAT in their wallet is redistributed to the websites they visit.

When Brave Ads kicks in, it will default to accumulating BAT for redistribution to publishers in the same fashion, unless the user changes the defaults.

Though the Brave browser blocks ads and trackers by default, Eich argues that this new product will start feeding funds out to its 55,000 verified publishers because he expects most users who opt-in will leave the defaults on, as most web users do.

Brave Ads launches today in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. Correction: Brave has 55,000 verified publishers, not 25,000, as was reported in an earlier version of this story.