The concept absolutely has merit. It's basically what all the music platforms are. People are willing to pay for content when they don't have to pay individually for every listen.

It cannot even theoretically happen without a third party. Someone has to accept payments from users while protecting their privacy and redistribute it for the concept to work. I don't "just want automated payments". I want a single payment that covers my browsing behavior per month. I wouldn't remotely consider a service that actually did a payment per visit. They can keep earning nothing from me if they want to do that.

I said "if Brave wasn't unhinged". But the core concept absolutely has merit.

There's no inherent reason you couldn't have sites opt in to another third party service, hosted by someone credible like Firefox, that just signed the connection as "paid", then distributed most of the revenue to the sites, and it wouldn't be hard for sites to take that "paid" signature and not display ads or trackers.

Look what they're doing now. They're using anti-adblocker tools to limit your access to the site, even though they know the conversion rate to people willing to watch ads is basically zero. If they had an option for "here's how you can give us money", a lot of them would take it. And there are plenty of people like me who would like to pay generally, but not dollars here and there to read single articles I have a passing interest in, and am just unwilling to allow the maliciousness (on several levels) of ads or the tracking for ads anywhere near my computer.

3.5mm jack and IR blaster?

I'm tempted to buy it just as a toy lol.

It's not just the ads. The structure is built around the ads and they're worse for it.

They already own all the big players.

If brave wasn't completely unhinged, the idea of the brave attention token was kind of a cool idea (assuming you could pay a reasonable rate and not with ads).

But yeah, I fundamentally am not OK with tracking, am fundamentally not OK with companies paying to try to manipulate me, and am fundamentally not OK with the big attack vector ads expose. I would be willing to pay a reasonable rate for quality content, but it's so fragmented there isn't really any way to do that, and because of the way the monetization works, a lot of that content is compromised. So the end result is I don't contribute anything to most sites I visit because I don't have a real way to do so, but will not watch ads.

Those already existed. They're audiobooks.

And audiobooks don't stop for ad breaks twice an hour and load up constant teases and recaps to bridge ad breaks and episodes.

"Hardware,” to my surprise, has been a relatively small part of the company, with just 41 employees paid a gross of more than $17 million in 2021

That's the only one I saw that meant anything that useful. They have ~10x that for game development but no indication of number of people there, and 79 people working on Steam.

Edited.

I just read their one example as one example, not as relative to the 70/30 split of CPUs used.

the team dives into game telemetry data (from Oodle) that shows Intel CPUs represent 70% of the error logs compared to AMD with just 30%.

~~Uh, what's the market share? You can't really provide the one number without the other.~~

lol IDK how to link to a user on this app, but look at mox right below me. It's just presented in a confusing way.

Disney won't sell licenses.

They'll keep their monopoly on 95% of the training data on the market for entertainment content, so they can accelerate their workflows using those tools, and everyone else is now trying to compete with their giant wallet and their extra tooling you're not allowed to compete with.

So I won't have a feature like this enabled if I can help it.

But it does kind of seem well intentioned. There are a lot of advertisement systems that are paid based on how many sales they actually create. The ways to do this are with tracking of some sort, which is a privacy nightmare if you give advertisers any control of it, or doing what products advertising on podcasts do and jacking up prices steeply enough that you can tell people "get a 30% discount with an advertiser code". Neither of those are great. If the browser provided a valid alternative that could only be used for specifically attributing ad conversions, and they eliminated all that other tracking, they might be able to lower some of the incentive to turn it into an arms race of new techniques. (Probably not, but it's not the worst aim.)

Now, I can't stand ads, and have managed to eliminate my exposure to them almost completely to live sports and product placement (and some billboards/signs I guess). (Brandwashed has some of my reasons, knowing the psychology side is more of it.) This won't change that, or any of the rest of my efforts to limit the ability to spy on my behavior. I will never allow tracking or advertising I can prevent. But I could see a path to it being better for the average consumer who's not militant about blocking all that.