Ad-blocking web browser Brave is hoping to open up a new income stream for YouTubers: cryptocurrency donations from their fans.
The company has expanded its ‘Brave Payments’ system so that individual online-video stars can register as ‘publishers’, rather than just website owners.
The system uses Brave’s ‘Basic Attention Tokens’ (BAT for short) which its users can assign to the websites (and now YouTubers) based on their web-browsing habits.
“YouTube viewers can either distribute contributions based on the time they spend viewing material or by ‘pinning’ a set amount for a particular channel. Previously, the BAT could only be distributed on a domain-by-domain basis,” explained the company in a blog post.
“The Brave browser provides an ad-free YouTube video experience. It also enables a direct monetary relationship between the content creator and their audience. Compensation for YouTube creators no longer needs to be based on vague rules or mercurial algorithms, as users can decide who to compensate.”
YouTubers will have to verify their channel by connecting to Brave via Google, and can then start collecting BAT donations, and converting them into ‘fiat’ (traditional: pounds, dollars etc) currency.
Brave says that it’s looking to expand beyond YouTube with this focus on individual creators, too.
“We plan on extending BAT to additional user-generated content platforms so that more creators can benefit from audience support, and anticipate seeing BAT’s utility grow as it supports more creators and publishers in our digital advertising and services platform,” claimed the company.
