Help I activated my VPN by accident! Will this affect my BATs rewards?

@VeeVets VPN or IP address would not necessarily have any impact on how much we earn per ad (beyond you don’t get paid for ads from outside your country). You are correct in that ad prices dropped. Toward the end of the Covid period, ad revenue was down for all businesses. Not only that, but the impact of everything that has happened with FTX, Genesis/Gemini, Binance, etc kind of caused some big interruptions in the crypto world.

Ad revenue is still down overall. To quote from AI:

Yes, ad revenue is still down, according to a major media agency that predicts that traditional media ad revenue will stagnate or decline in 2024.

There is some potential upswing with crypto tokens increasing and advertising slowly returning. Such as:

According to Digiday, digital advertising is expected to grow 7.2% in 2024, up from 5.5% in 2023.

You’ll also have seen that Solana went from nearly $20 to recently hitting near $200 (currently at about $182).

And BAT had been down to like $0.17 for a short period and recently had gotten above $0.30 (currently at $0.29).

Brave is cautious on making big adjustments to how much BAT we earn per ad. Overall prices have decreased or stagnated due to the decreases I mentioned above. Though you can also see where I made an attempt a while ago to explain ad prices and all. That topic is at PSA: BAT Ad Prices Explained (kind of)

All of that just goes down to that yes, pay has dropped. I used to average 15-20 BAT per month, with some months even seeing as high as 50. But lately, I’m lucky if I get anywhere near 10 BAT.

  • March = 8.5
  • February = 7.55
  • January = 6.29
  • December = 3.91
  • November = 4.48
  • October = 11.53
  • September = 14.96

List goes on. So yeah, it’s just Brave. And if you have any more doubts, all we ever have to do is look at https://brave.com/transparency/ and look at Brave initiated BAT purchases. Those purchases are how they fund our Rewards payments.

If you go back to like 2022, they were buying 200,000+ BAT a few times each month. Then in 2022 actually started buying millions of BAT each month, which is when we all did very well on payments. But now, they are only buying every few months. So went from buying monthly (or multiple times a month) from ad campaigns to buying in April, June, November, and now March. Obviously some gaps there where they aren’t buying every month anymore.

Basically, us seeing slowdown on them buying BAT tells us their marketing team is doing a horrible job of selling ads and Brave has been able to stretch out payments with what they have in their possession without buying more.