As a digital consumer, ads probably aren’t a favorite part of the online experience. However, as Brave VP of Operations and Services Jimmy Secretan says, “digital advertising is a vital component for funding content creators, which helps keep the internet as we know it, free.” From the product management perspective, though, it can be pricey and a user experience nightmare.
On Brave Ads
Digital advertising is an important component of the online experience. With a lot of patch jobs out there on the internet, however, there needed to be a better way for users to experience ads within the browser. In a clear address to privacy, Jimmy says that with Brave, consumer data never leaves the device.
“Brave’s primary goal is to protect the user from privacy invading services, but we knew we needed to provide alternate ways to support creators. Essentially, they can sign up with Brave and through a tipping support panel, they can contribute to the user.”
“We needed to cut users into it. We’re rewarding users for their attention and we wanted outcomes to be genuine, because users will notice when an ad is relevant or not.”
“It’s a low friction way to send secure crypto-value to users without pulling out a credit card.”
On the effect of rewarding the user
So much of ad-tech rhetoric centers around a need for better targeted ads. Jimmy refutes that by stating that a lot of users are simply tired of the ad experience. Starting from a place of healthy skepticism, Brave delivers a re-imagined online advertising experience that directly rewards the user, and now, of the 24 million users of the Brave Browser, about 4+ million engage with Brave Ads. Numbers like that are worth noticing.
“We did a lot to try to make the experience noticeable but subtle, and integrated with the day-to-day. We knew instinctively that it couldn’t be a race to overwhelm the user. For instance, we use certain timing tricks that make it so users don’t see more ads than a few an hour.”
“Typical CTR is 9%, heads and shoulders above a lot of the comparable ads out there. We believe it’s because we pulled things back. Also visually, our head of design does an incredible job of walking the line between making the ads attractive, engaging, while delivering the value needed.”
“We’ve reoriented things by doing the hard math in the background, then in real-time showing the user what they’re accumulating minute-by-minute.”
In the Q&A portion, Jimmy speaks on publisher ads, app adoption, and how local and small businesses benefit from the Brave Ads concept. Make sure to catch the full video above!
Finally, Brave Ads is hiring for help with building their self-service ad product. Check it out at brave.com/careers.
About the speaker
Jimmy Secretan is VP of Services and Operations at Brave, where he oversees product and engineering for Brave Ads, which rewards users for seeing privacy safe advertising. He also manages the teams that work on Brave Today (Brave’s news product) and a number of other services. Before Brave, he was CTO at the travel app company Roadtrippers, where he led the engineering and product teams. Prior, his experience focused on private and scalable ad technology at companies like Sonobi and Korrelate. Jimmy holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of Central Florida.