The Brave Browser: How much money can your website or YouTube channel make as a publisher?

As a professional web developer and content creator, I‘m always on the lookout for new ways to monetize my work online. One platform that‘s caught my attention lately is the Brave browser. Brave is an open-source, privacy-focused browser that blocks ads and trackers by default. But what sets it apart is its unique approach to compensating publishers through its Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency.

The idea is that users can opt into viewing privacy-respecting ads and earn BAT for their "attention". They can then contribute that BAT to their favorite websites and YouTube channels, either automatically each month or through one-time tips. As a publisher, you can claim these contributions by verifying your site or channel with Brave.

It‘s an intriguing model that aims to rewards publishers more directly, cut out the ad-tech middlemen, and provide users with a cleaner browsing experience. But the big question is, how much can you actually earn as a Brave publisher? Let‘s dive in and find out.

How Brave payments work for publishers

Before we get into the numbers, let‘s quickly review how Brave payments work for publishers. The process is fairly straightforward:

1. Verify ownership of your website or YouTube channel through Brave‘s publisher portal.
2. Encourage your audience to use the Brave browser and contribute BAT to your site/channel.
3. Receive monthly BAT payments from Brave based on your share of user contributions.
4. Convert BAT to your local fiat currency (e.g. USD) through Brave‘s partner Uphold.

Brave takes a 5% cut of user contributions as a fee, while the publisher gets the remaining 95%. For direct tips, the publisher gets 100%.

It‘s important to note that in order to actually withdraw your BAT earnings, you‘ll need to complete additional KYC/AML verification with Uphold. This is required to comply with financial regulations around cryptocurrency. The process involves submitting personal info and ID documents, similar to signing up for a bank account.

Estimating Brave publisher earnings

Now for the fun part—estimating how much you can earn as a Brave verified publisher. Brave doesn‘t provide public data on individual publisher earnings. But we can make some educated guesses based on Brave‘s overall usage and financials.

According to Brave‘s transparency report, as of December 2021, the browser has:

• 50.2 million monthly active users
• 1.3 million verified publishers
• 12.5 million BAT distributed to publishers each month

If we assume that BAT is distributed evenly among publishers (which of course it isn‘t, but bear with me for simplicity), that works out to an average of around 9.6 BAT per publisher per month. At the current BAT price of $0.40, that‘s $3.84 per month, or $46 per year.

However, we know that Brave contributions follow a power law distribution, with the most popular publishers earning the lion‘s share. Based on data from BATGrowth, the top 1000 publishers receive over 50% of all BAT contributions.

So a more realistic estimate would be that the vast majority of publishers are earning less than $5 per month from Brave, while a small minority are earning much more. Here‘s a very rough breakdown of what monthly Brave earnings might look like at different audience sizes:

Monthly pageviews/viewers	Brave users (1%)	Contribution rate (20%)	BAT per month	USD per month
10,000	100	20	28.8	$11.52
50,000	500	100	144	$57.60
100,000	1,000	200	288	$115.20
1,000,000	10,000	2,000	2,880	$1,152.00

Of course, these are just ballpark estimates. Your actual earnings will depend on factors like:

• The demographics of your audience and what portion use Brave
• How engaged your audience is and likely to contribute
• The country your audience is from (Brave adoption varies globally)
• The niche and competitiveness of your content vertical

For context, I run a fairly popular web development blog and YouTube channel, with around 50k monthly sessions and 20k subscribers. Over the past year, I‘ve earned around 3,000 BAT total from Brave, averaging about 250 BAT ($100) per month. This puts me above the 50th percentile of publishers but well below the top 1%.

How does Brave stack up to other monetization methods?

Earning $100 per month in passive income is nothing to sneeze at. But how does it compare to other ways publishers can monetize their content? Here‘s a quick rundown:

• Display advertising: The most common way to monetize web traffic is through display ads, usually via an ad network like Google AdSense. Typical RPMs (revenue per 1000 pageviews) range from $1-$10 depending on niche and audience geo. So if you‘re getting 50k monthly pageviews, that equates to $50-$500 per month. Brave earnings can be competitive with this, especially considering you avoid the ugliness of display ads.

• Affiliate marketing: If your content includes product recommendations and reviews, you can earn commissions by linking to those products with affiliate links. Commissions are typically in the 1-10% range. So if you refer $5,000 worth of products in a month, that could be $50-$500 in affiliate income. This can be more lucrative than Brave, but also requires more active promotion and sales.

• Sponsorships: If you have a large and engaged audience, you may be able to land direct sponsorship deals. A typical sponsorship for a 30-60 second podcast or YouTube ad might pay $500-$1000, though big names can command much more. Brave earnings are unlikely to reach this level for most publishers.

• Subscriptions/memberships: Another growing trend is for publishers to offer paid subscriptions or memberships to access exclusive content and perks. These can range from a few bucks to $50+ per month. If you can get 1-2% of your audience to subscribe, this can add up. Brave earnings can be a nice complement to this, providing an easy way for casual fans to support you.

• Donations/tips: Many publishers also solicit direct one-time donations or tips from their audience, either via PayPal/Stripe or crypto. This is probably the closest comparison to Brave, in that it‘s a voluntary contribution from users. 5-10% of your audience tipping a few bucks each month can be comparable to (or even exceed) typical Brave earnings.

So in summary, Brave probably won‘t replace other monetization methods for most publishers, but can be a nice supplement. It‘s low effort to set up, unobtrusive to users, and provides "free" income you might not otherwise get.

Brave‘s monetization model and financials

To understand the potential future earnings of Brave publishers, it‘s helpful to look at Brave‘s overall business model and financials.

Brave makes money by selling its own privacy-respecting ads, which appear as OS notifications separate from web content. Advertisers can target ads based on browser-side intent signals, but Brave never shares user data outside the device.

Brave takes a 30% cut of this ad revenue, while 70% is shared between users (15%) and publishers (55%) in BAT. The more users opt into Brave ads and the more advertisers that buy them, the more revenue there is to go around.

According to Brave‘s SEC filings, in fiscal 2020 the company earned:

• $4.6 million in ad revenue
• $389k in publisher referral fees
• $137k in merch sales and other revenue

That means total revenue of around $5 million, while expenses were $29.6 million, for a net loss of $24.5 million. Brave is still a startup burning cash to grow.

The company has raised over $100 million to date, most notably from its $35 million ICO in 2017. It has fairly deep pockets, but will need to ramp up revenue significantly to reach profitability.

As of March 2021, Brave‘s cash balance was around $97 million. At 2020‘s burn rate of $2 million per month, that gives it around 4 years of runway. But expenses are likely to grow as Brave scales.

Longer term, Brave is betting on a few key growth drivers:

• The continued rise of privacy regulations like GDPR and the deprecation of third-party cookies, which hurt traditional web advertising and make Brave‘s privacy-focused model more attractive
• Growing publisher and advertiser adoption of BAT as a more efficient and fraud-resistant way to monetize content and reach audiences
• Increasing user demand for ad blocking and privacy tools, driven by ever more invasive ad-tech and data harvesting
• Expanding its product suite with things like search, e-commerce, and a Brave-branded stable coin to capture more market share and use cases

If Brave succeeds, the upside for publishers could be significant. A larger user base and higher ad revenue mean more BAT to go around. And success for Brave would likely drive up the price of BAT itself, further juicing publisher earnings.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. Brave faces stiff competition from the likes of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, plus dozens of other blockchain projects gunning for the digital advertising market. Its success is still far from certain. But for publishers, the potential reward may be worth the risk of getting in early.

Closing thoughts

As someone who‘s been following Brave for a while and has seen modest earnings from it as a publisher, I‘m cautiously optimistic about its future. I like that it‘s trying to solve real problems in the web content ecosystem—invasive ads, rampant tracking, unfair monetization—with an innovative, user-centric model.

At the same time, I recognize that Brave is still a niche player in a brutally competitive market. It faces an uphill battle against tech giants and entrenched ad-tech interests. Its token economics are still a bit speculative and untested at scale.

But I‘m rooting for it to succeed. Because if it does, it could mean a more sustainable and equitable future for web content—one where publishers are rewarded more directly for their work, users have more control over their data and attention, and advertisers can reach audiences more efficiently.

As a publisher, getting verified with Brave is a no-brainer in my opinion. It costs nothing and takes minutes to set up. Worst case, you get a trickle of extra income each month. Best case, you ride the wave of a paradigm shift in web monetization.

If you‘re already creating content on the web or considering starting, I highly recommend giving Brave a shot. And of course, if you‘re a user of the web (who isn‘t?), consider downloading Brave and supporting your favorite publishers with BAT.

The web is at a crossroads, with the old models of advertising and monetization breaking down. Brave offers a glimmer of a more user-centric, less exploitative future. Let‘s hope it can deliver on that promise. Your attention will be the judge.