There is representation in Tier 5.
Since the original communication was in email it was decided that it would be better to not list all 124 countries and regions in Tier 5.
When there is a listing on a web page, it will be possible to list all 124 countries and regions.
@alex you are just turning this into a joke. when I talk about tier representation I mean Tier 1 - 4. By your statement
This doesnāt qualify Africa and African countries. As I have said it isnāt about the money, it is about respect. Africa is the only continent that doesnāt have representation in tier 1 - tier 4. So please @alex do not give the tier 5 argument.
Tier 5 Countries
If a country has not been listed in any of the other tiers, it will be in Tier 5.
That is from the mail sent to creators. So the continent of over a billion people is lumped in with just ānot been listed in any of the other tiersā
PS it is 03:29 and am too tired to hear ooh you are in tier 5.
This is absolutely not a joke to me. The 124 countries were not listed as many people receive email on a mobile device and it would have made for considerably long scrolling. That was the UX concern.
As I mentioned in this thread and others, the listing concerns for which countries are in which tiers have been relayed back to the team. Other representatives of various tier regions have also communicated on this topic.
Tier 5 is a real tier, the referral rate is $1 BAT equivalent. It is not $0. As you said from your point of view it is not about the money. The listing only reflects the referral rates and thus are only about money.
The point then is why arenāt African countries and in particular South Africa where ads will be available in the future being paid more.
As you noted with the code reference, new countries are being added. However, that is in Nightly and will not reach production until November at the earliest. Therefore there are actually only a very small number of folks from South Africa who would be capable of seeing ads today (only a couple thousand people use Nightly currently, I personally donāt know where any are from geographically) and NONE of them would be possible via the referral system which only distributes the production branch.
@Alex let me give you a run down of what the tier list looks like.
The original:
Tier 1 Countries
United States
Tier 2 Countries
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom
Tier 3 Countries
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan,
Tier 4 Countries
Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czechia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mexico, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay
Tier 5 Countries
If a country has not been listed in any of the other tiers, it will be in Tier 5.
What I and Africans see:
Tier 1 Countries
USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!
Tier 2 Countries
Oh Canada, Rich European countries,major Asian player, rich Asian countries and the two whitest country in the whole continent of Australia or Oceania
Tier 3 Countries
Other European countries and a blend of Asian countries
Tier 4 Countries
hey South America, the other part of North America below the USA southern border, Asia with a sprinkling of some European countries
Tier 5 Countries
Participation trophy or better know as thank you for existing the continent of Africa. You are not ready to have at least a seat at low class Tier 4. We know you have 54 countries
54 out of 124 countries that is 43.548387096774193548387096774194%.
@alex I can make it simpler 70 countries + Africa - Tier 5. 124 looks too large
@alex Free advise. Please stop trying to justify this decision to exclude an entire continent and Apologise. Say Brave would do better in its policy making and would try to be more inclusive. Anything you say just makes things worse
if 
those do not paint a bad picture Brave has a long way to go in being a global company. Good night.
It is unfortunate that is the perception held by you.
China and India represent nearly 40% of all human life on Earth and they are in the same tier.
Who would not want to see their home listed as high as possible? On a personal note, half of my family is in Tier 5. We have employees and families in Tier 5 represented regions. It is not a disrespect to be in Tier 5.
You say 124 looks too large, but that is the point. Africa is not alone in Tier 5. Each of the countries matter. Each of the humans in those countries love their home just as much as you do yours.
As I stated in my personal request, please show me another program that pays better than Brave. To the best of my knowledge Brave still pays above industry standard rates. That is not a disrespect to be paid above industry standard.
@alex I am no longer going to reply you after this. China is a tough market to crack with all their government policy, their anti-privacy stance for citizens and all other host of issues. Trade war and all. Even google pulled out of china. Facebook isnāt allow in china. The government has so much control. They are all probably using UC browser which is also chromium based.
if you want to play the population size card, Africa is the second most populated continent on the planet. 16.36% wikipedia 2016.
Stop bringing money into the conversation. It is about respect.
Wow. A lot has been said on this issue. I appreciate everyone. We are defined by our actions and inaction. I think this will be the fourth time of visiting this community website; surprisingly, 2 of the 4 visits r within 24hrs. Several inferences can be drawn from the foregoing but Iāll like say every well thought out action is right, itās just relative( in perception). I was privileged to be with Joyce Banda, she said: about 70% of what weāve become is from the society. The point Iām driving home is that, thereās going to be an aftermath and a ripple reaction to all these.
I for one see the entirety of brave as transactional. Truth be told, Iām at the vantage point. But it doesnāt negate the fact there room for improvement.
I understand the company trying to protect itself from malicious persons trying to portray the companyās brand. As a logical thinker, I think there should be probable cause before such negative and biased moved is made to such down unless its a company rule (of which I doubt because of scaling/growth). I wonāt join any twitter account created for brave any other time irrespective of who creates it. Iāll stick to brave as a transactional system.
I will like to say that, word of mouth is the best form of marketing and to some extent the conviction needed has been trodden down.
Personally, I have never profited from brave, but I sure will now. I will not speak ill of brave because thatās not me, conversely be sure Iāll not speak good neither.
I sincerely hope we all can get better on our lives daily and let love prevail. Humanity first.
Thanks everyone.
O Onakunle
I wanted to thank @heydanmurphy for following our channel during the brief period it existed and @bravesupport for liking our retweets
He must really love Brave. He gave you an out and you failed to take it on the South Africa issue.
Hello everyone,
Iām on the business team, and am leading the business effort around bringing the ad platform to market.
After reading the thread, Iām going to provide some context regarding the ad platform rollout, with the hope that providing the context will help provide some clarity around the ad rollout.
First and foremost, the Brave browser is free, open, and available pretty much everywhere. Itās important not to conflate an optional referral program or the ad platform with the core product that we release in market.
The ad platform is an addition to the product that weāre working to integrate across the globe as soon as possible, and weāre making progress.
Regarding the regional ad platform rollout, there are several factors that went into the countries that we selected release support for Brave Ads.
Before I go into those, I also want to clarify that regional support is a temporary issue, and we aim to support a majority of countries by the end of this year, with even more early next year.
Itās definitely in our business interests as a company to support as many countries as possible, and we are working in earnest to support many new countries.
Itās important to keep in mind that the ad platform was first introduced into our Release channel at the end of April. The team is still working to integrate and release ads on iOS. Having Brave Ads supported across all operating systems will free up additional resources to focus on additional country/region support. Not excuses, just reality.
The issues were larger than merely population density per country.
When we looked at the initial regions we went to market with, we evaluated:
Current Brave user base per country (available amount of people to potentially opt-in to advertising)
Potential supply available, based on different potential opt-in rates (remember, Brave users have to opt-in to ads, so weāre looking at a percentage of a percentage).
Of our existing user base, the percentage of people using Brave per operating system. Do we observe a similar split across operating systems for the country? is a majority of the users in the country only on iOS, or the blend is even between win/mac/android? Those percentages were taken into consideration.
Whatās the current state of known advertiser demand, and potential demand from advertisers for the countries involved? If we were to have ample ad demand, would we have enough ad supply to meet the demand?
How many languages are spoken in these countries, and what is the % of people speaking each in these countries (from different available open resources that we were able to use to infer this information)?
The languages spoken per country was an important factor, because not only does this influence economics and operations (given that we onboard advertisers and campaigns as a managed service until we have our self-serve buying platform available), but there are legitimate technical issues and resources that are impacted by how many languages are spoken in each country.
I can explain this in a little more detail. If you look at how Brave Ads functions, we ship ad matching logic directly to the device. The local machine learning models that are used to match ads in Brave require language localization before we enable ads support in a given country. This basically means that we have to train the machine learning model to work in languages other than English, and also use resources to make sure that the quality of the model and matching are up to par.
Weāre even accelerating this by initially releasing a beta version without the full matching logic to regions in v0.71 that have language crossover and existing ad demand, in advance of releasing the fully-trained model. Weāre doing this to help get us as global as possible with the ad platform as soon as possible, for countries where we already have existing ad demand, and the supply potential makes sense.
So the total amount of languages spoken, the percentage of languages spoken, the amount of existing Brave users per country, and the percentage of users on each platform, along with existing and potential ad demand and supply issues were all factors in the regional rollout plan.
For example, with India, there are a lot of languages spoken, but we were able to determine that there is a very high demand from advertisers, and that we have a lot of potential supply for India if we were to include them sooner rather than later. This was not the case with a lot of other countries, but weāre working to get them supported as soon as possible regardless, they just arenāt in the first few groups we release to.
There are other concerns that needed to be factored in as well:
Do the countries have regulation prohibiting crypto in place?
Is there an alternative track we can take for countries that do not support crypto?
How soon do we estimate support will be available?
Are there other potential risks that Brave needs to account for around regulation, outside of crypto?
As I mentioned above, these are temporary issues, and the team is working in earnest to support as much of the globe as fast as we can.
Regarding Africa, there is an increase in digital ad demand in African countries, but the proportion our existing user base in African countries was significantly smaller than other countries when we made our decision for the rollout.
If we look at South Africa, there are 11 languages spoken in South Africa. If we pick the two primary languages spoken, a small percentage becomes even smaller. If we evaluate potential ad demand and supply among popular languages, even smaller.
Iām putting the time in here to provide the context and transparency in an effort to help put the release rollout into perspective. I hope that the context proves helpful.
In hindsight, we could have done a better job of explaining these decisions, and will moving forward.
We certainly take the feedback seriously, and understand that it would be ideal to have equal support across all countries. Weāre working to make that happen soon.
@Batnigeria Never force my hand into a conversation. @sampson I do not care about the issue you have with @Batnigeria but I do feel the impersonation charge was a bit too excessive, since all he was doing was still in line with Brave community standard.
In this race based world I leave my home each day remembering I am first a Black man, then a programmer, then anything else i wish to be. That training is what make me, me
@Asad can confirm that for as long as he has known me I always put the great good or the bigger picture above myself. The first time I had the Chance to speak to brendan, though I was under review and felt it was unjust, I used the opportunity to speak about advancing brave in Africa and Nigeria not about my review status. This was done on twitter. The first time I spoke to @sampson was also on twitter. You may know me as @onunx on twitter. All the merch gifted to me was donated not because I didnāt like them but it is all for publicity. I gave the water bottle to my brother because I know he is in an environment where students, professors, doctors and others would always see him and they would always see a Brave Water bottle. This was done to start a conversation and they would download brave. I personally never cared too much about the money and the referral program. When I was place under review, my brother @Onakunleoo who saw my effort to acquire the BATs asked if I wanted to Quit on brave, because in his view I worked 16hours a day calling and pushing and got almost 0. I smiled and told him for me the money was just a bonus and it was never about the money. I have several chat with friends where i just said download brave without giving my referral because All I want is just download brave. I have people i have given the Github Link to download Brave offline copy for windows pc because they werenāt with their laptop when we met.
@asad can also confirm that our last conversation I requested the community be placed above me. I was talking about some interest, I had and the ones my immediate community has. @asad can also confirm some suggestion I gave to help capture the African Market.
I was the first to post on the community Wikipedia had join brave as a community post. I was the first to send a message of compassion during the earthquake.
@Mattches @eljuno @Asad have seen my commitment to this community and my community. It has always been there and it would be there so @Batnigeria Before you started fighting for the Nigerian and African community, I have been fighting for the same community. So @alex money isnāt everything with me, Respect and passion is everything to me. @luke.mulks Gave a better explanation but it doesnāt mean I would let Brave off the hook so easily.
This is what I would hold @Employees to. Do better and be inclusive.
@luke.mulks watched your interview. You need more africans in the room not just africans by blood but also african that grew up on the continent they have a better view on how to advertise. Than any other expert
I still want at least a single African country in the tier 1-4 spot. Since there are European countries without ads on those tiers
Dgenies, I appreciate your contribution here at the forum. But right now, you are mixing geopolitical topics with the business ones. I am coming from tier 4 country. However, concerning the GDP per capita (proxy to disposable income) we should be somewhere else, never the less, as a marketer, I understand and respect the decision because:
Brave is a private company, by the law, they are here to make money; if their choices are not bringing money, Brave will go out of business. No Brave, no tiers. So we have to look at decisions through this optic predominantly. Thus providing other than monetary arguments is not helping the discussion.
The value of the users (thus the reward) is derived by the demand from advertisers, USA is not the richest country by GDP per capita, but it is the richest country by volume, so advertisers can scale the campaign if it works. In the end, advertisers are those who are paying the rewards. If I/you want to see our country in higher tier we need to work on that.
Here is an interesting point from Brave Advertiser who is elaborating on that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/d389wl/podcast_discussing_bat_campaign_results/
And lastly, I think the Brave showed respect to your concerns since you have here an answer from the head of the department.
alex statements triggered me and by making money like a theme only made me more triggered. I did agree with luke mulks, his answer was more comprehensive than anything Alex said. The money statement made it feel like I read 12k post for money? Nah! It is was for passion! I am always respectful! So the money comment and implying things like South Africa didnāt have ads just triggered me. @macropulos
I made this statement few days ago
When you are in a position that picks you last mostly because of your skin colour, your country or your continent. Some certain type of speech just brings out the other side of you. @macropulos @alex @Asad @sampson @luke.mulks I am not apologising for that side of me because all that side wants is more inclusion, respect and equity.
