Hi @Donboven, I’m on the Brave/BAT team, and am happy to help provide some clarity on this item.
It might seem a bit antithetical that Brave Ads would not display with a VPN enabled, especially given both VPN use among our audience, and that Brave has a VPN+Firewall product offering.
The issue with running a VPN with Brave Ads, is that in most cases, the VPN locale is likely outside of the actual country the user is in. When an advertiser is buying an ad campaign, they are selecting a country for the ads to run in, with an expectation that Brave will be serving ads to people within that country. There are several reasons for this, with a few being that advertisers often may not be able to legally operate in certain countries or regions, they may not service or may not support shipping to specific countries, or may have a product they’re advertising that performs better in one country over another. Brave has an obligation to serve an ad to a user in a country that the advertiser has chosen to serve to. Brave determines location using our privacy preserving ads protocol, meaning that the location is inferred locally on the device, but that’s the primary reason why you are not likely to observe ads with a VPN enabled. I hope this helps!