PSA: Friendly Reminder For People Having Issues with Rewards/Ads

Hey all! I keep seeing a lot of the same questions and wanted to remind everyone that some of it has been addressed by Brave. This is not an exhaustive resource and will be a bit long. My hope is that it might help some of you as this information is kind of scattered all over the place and a lot of users are sharing some misinformation…such as the thought that you have to click ads to earn BAT. So here we go, just my own personal attempt to explain what little I know and link to official resources for you to see for yourself. Remember, when in doubt, message moderators. (And remember, I’m not a moderator or affiliated with Brave in any way. I’m just a normal user)

HOW TO SEE ADS AND EARN

  1. Your IP address and device location MUST be in an ad supported region. It is vital to realize if you use a VPN and your device Locale is at a different location, you won’t see ads or earn BAT. Also true if yours matches but you’re not in a ad supported region
  1. Make sure Brave Rewards is turned on and you’ve chosen a set amount of ads per hour. NOTE This is only the MAXIMUM per hour. We aren’t guaranteed ads, it all depends on your location and how many advertisers are available. We also are limited to how many times we can see each ad. So it’s possible to hit the ad cap and be stuck with nothing.

User exceeded the frequency caps for their region

  1. There are a LOT of things that can interfere with ads. For example,

running your browser in full screen will cause ads not to show.

Turning off notifications, running in Game Mode, or even having Focus Assist can also stop them.

For a full list of some of the things that can prevent ads, check out https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055013431-Why-don-t-I-see-any-Brave-Ads-after-enabling-them-

  1. Recognize that there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to click on ads. We are given BAT from ads based on it appearing in our notifications. You don’t need to interact with them. In fact, Brave has asked that we only interact with ads if we are interested in them.

How long do I have to view the ad before my “attention” accounts as a “view”?

Users are rewarded for viewing ad notifications as they appear in Brave. Users are not rewarded for clicking on ads.

What exactly am I getting paid for? Just seeing the ad notification or actually clicking the ad?

In the initial Brave Ads release, users receive BAT for viewing the ad notifications. In future releases, users will be able to earn additional rewards for engagement events within the ad tabs. Brave does not reward users for clicking on the notifications. Brave’s position is that users should only click on ads that they have a genuine interest in engaging with.

  1. Exception Unfortunately iPad and iPhone are not able to earn BAT at this time due to Apple. Those of us with either can still opt into ads but we won’t receive BAT. Instead 100% of earnings from those ads will go to Brave for future development and their maintenance on the Brave Browser for Apple devices. https://brave.com/rewards-ios/

EDIT Not 100%. They are saying it gets divided up and some of the BAT goes to support creators who are established with Brave. Either way, opting in helps to give incentive to creators to work with Brave to give us the best and safest experience.

WHY HAS MY ESTIMATED BAT DECREASED?
It’s important to remember that everything is an estimate until it processes. Advertisers can pay in either BAT or USD and this is then divided among users. As the month goes on, the system tries to track the price of BAT and your payout will change based on that. For those who paid in cash, that means as BAT value increases, you’ll receive less. Like if an ad somehow paid you 1 BAT, which was valued at $0.50 but then increases to $1.20, you’ll not receive 1 BAT but instead would receive something like .62 BAT or so. The trick here is it’s not just based on the current market, but the overall 30 days, which of course changes up until the time payments roll out. If you’d like to dig deeper, I’ll link two articles below here. The main thing to remember is your ESTIMATED total is just that, an estimate and may change.

I DID NOT GET MY BAT
There’s actually a lot of things that could be happening. A lot of times people assume it’s Brave but that’s not always the case.

  1. Gemini and Uphold have blacklisted some regions due to an increased amount of fraud. If you’re in those areas, Brave will be unable to send the BAT to your accounts. It will still exist on Brave, but it will only be available for tipping until Gemini and Uphold reopen the wallets in those regions again. Changes to Brave Ads Regional Availability

  2. There is actually a small delay in payments for newer people/wallets. This means your current cycle might not pay out immediately and instead pays out the following. There has been a lot of progress to eliminate this issue but it does show its head on occasion. An example of a post where Brave staff shared on this can be seen at https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/bkyn0r/notice_brave_ads_hotfix_dont_worry_you_didnt_lose/

  3. Some people don’t know how to follow directions. While the example I’m linking to isn’t about Rewards, it’s a good example of how people don’t pay attention.

But this also has been a regular issue in people not confirming email for Uphold, inputting the wrong information, etc.

  1. This kind of goes with things said prior, but it’s important to check that you’ve got all your things in order. People tend to forget to set up verifications or even ignore Uphold or Gemini, when sometimes issues on their end. An example of this is @steeven please read this / Incomplete December Payout - #3 by steeven

  2. Sometimes things just go wrong. In this situation you’re asked to reach out to staff/moderators such as @steeven . It is often best to DM him and provide the below quoted information. Again, that’s in a direct message. Keep your data safe and try not to share publicly.

Thank you for reporting! Please DM with the following information:

  • Copy/paste your Wallet ID (found on brave://rewards-internals )
  • Your OS and Brave version (first three lines in brave://version )
  • A screenshot of your Rewards panel in Settings --> Brave Rewards .

This will help to speed up the troubleshooting. Thank you in advance!

  1. Your account may have been flagged.

There are many reasons this can happen. One example is running multiple browsers with the same wallet ID (each browser on different devices have a different internal Wallet, so cloning this flags as possible issue or fraud) Another would be using a VPN to pretend you’re in another region to earn BAT. Essentially any activity that violates TOS, poses a security risk to your account, or anything that might be questionable will flag the account so that Brave and Brave users aren’t losing money. Currently there is no way to know if you’ve been flagged beyond messaging moderators/staff as mentioned in #5.

  1. And I’m sure there’s more things that I’m not listing because I don’t have a clue. It’s important to reach out to staff if you ever have concerns. Yet it’s equally important to remember they don’t have a lot of staff and they receive thousands of messages and notifications each day. While they do their best to get back to us, it can sometimes take a while. Try to be patient and remember, they are just human like you.
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Very nice! Thank-you for your time and effort. :clap: :clap: :clap:

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Thanks so much for this excellent response. My Gemini wallet seems to work fine now receiving BAT rewards. Uphold seems scammy to me.

I love BAT, the Brave browser and search engine and constantly recommend them to my friends.

Keep up the great work.

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Lots of great stuff here! Thanks for the info. As a newer user it was very helpful!

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Thanks for putting this together.

Ads worked just fine for me but stopped in November or December randomly.

I have been trying for weeks to get ads to work again, and it’s great to at least see that there’s a community of similarly suffering people.

My best guess at the moment is that I was incorrectly flagged. I have no idea what for.

One thing which would be a helpful addition would be a list of staff/moderators you recommend contacting. If anyone has got ahold of a staff member, it would be good to note as well which one.

I sent a message 11 days ago to both steeven and tmancey and still am waiting for any reply. (Doesn’t look like it was even opened.) I don’t know how long I should expect to wait and want to make sure I contacted the right person.

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It gets hard to know what’s going on. As mentioned in my long part, Steeven and the others handle lots of issues each day. They try to get to people but don’t always make it as far down the list as they’d like. You know how it is, us humans only have so much time a day to do things and troubles never seem to stop pouring in. I can promise they are trying their best.

In the meanwhile, I’d say to make sure you’re looking at the basic troubleshooting yourself. Like if you’re on a Windows computer, make sure you have Focus Assist turned off because otherwise it blocks the notifications from appearing. Also little things like watching stuff in full screen will pause ads, as they don’t want it to interrupt your videos. Even at one time, they noticed gaming mouse sent signals through the driver that stopped ads. There’s just way too many things that can go wrong.

On top of that, don’t forget that you can only see certain ads so many times and if there’s not a lot of advertisers paying for your region, you could have weeks or months of not seeing anything. As much as we always want to have the maximum allowable ads and all that money rolling in, it’s not guaranteed.

Obviously the team is always looking for bugs and when we all come together to post of issues, they can try to track it down. If you want to know who you can DM, it’s listed at https://community.brave.com/about though it doesn’t necessarily show their specialties.

You’ll find there’s only 4 Admin and 7 Moderators. Here in the past 24 hours, there were 986 posts. If they were all active, that would mean each one would have had to go through about 89 posts each (actually 90 if you round up). The reason why I say “if they were all active” is because we have some of them who are busy behind the scenes and don’t have an active presence here. Examples are:

  • @rebron2000 (Product Manager) who hasn’t commented on the forum since Jul 17, '19 (2019) and who last posted about something back in August 2021 (Aug 11, '21).
  • @Aa-ron ( Brave Support) whose last post AND last comment was Nov 17, '21 .
  • @luke.mulks (VP, Business Ops) who last posted and commented on Nov 24, '21
  • If you also take out Atsushisa Atsushi since they are Japan support. (they are active, just handling Japan)

That means the ones we always see active here are:

  • @sriram (QA Engineer, Photographer)
  • @steeven (No title shown on profile) but he’s everywhere and tends to focus on helping people receive their BAT whenever there’s issues)
  • @Mattches (Browser Support)
  • Sampson (Leader/Developer Relations) - Well, not sure if he fits here but he at least had commented on January 10. Though he stopped following up on some of those.
  • @brian (No title shown on profile) but he seems to help a lot on wallets and all when I looked through his activity
  • @SaltyBanana ( User Support) - This is another who seems to help with EVERYTHING but does tend to focus on getting payments to people alongside of steeven.
  • @eljuno (Community Moderator) - Eljuno seems to bounce around and answer questions on everything. I was trying to look at a “focus” or specialty, but no clue. Profile does say "Full-time artist • Brave user + contributor since 2016 "

So that means based on last 24 hours, we’ve had 986 posts divided among 7 people, give or take. I mean, you still have to subtract like Sampson who hasn’t replied or posted since Jan 10, so been gone for 2 weeks. That would mean 986 posts would have to be split up by at least the remaining 6. That would be 164 posts each. Of course then they also have all the tags (like how I just tagged them all here…) and DM in addition to those posts.

Hopefully you can imagine how difficult it is to read and respond to all of those posts, comments, and DM while ALSO still having to work to resolve each issue.

They are real MVPs and are awesome at what they do. It just takes time and a little patience. As long as you’ve messaged them, they’ll be sure to get to you. As to their specialties or titles, I at least tried putting that for you here from what they openly share. Who knows, maybe one or all of them will reply here to help us know if there’s one person who is better to contact over the other in order to get assistance.

Adding all that as I hope it helps you understand a bit more on why it might take a while for you to get responses sometimes.

Oh, and I know the “Leader” badge/title gets tossed to a lot of people. @tmancey is one of them. There’s 114 with it but MANY if not MOST of them haven’t been active here since like 2020. They even have a new one, darnell, who literally just joined the site 1 day ago and immediately got the badge, with no posts or replies anywhere. I’m not sure if they are all employees, if some are just normal people who were active, if it’s a blend of it, if some are former staff, or what? Obviously knowing more on that would help know who to reach out to for help.

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You guys are doing a great job! I am really grateful for this browser and all the benefits it comes with

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Thanks @Saoiray for taking the time to put this together! :clap:

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:clap: OP should be marked as Wiki. May be @HighPriestess42 can do it.

Okay, I kind of said it in the bigger post at the start, but figured I’d add a little thing. For Windows, it’s important to turn off Focus Assist, including the settings for “Automatic Rules.” In addition, you need to make sure you have your Notifications turned on for Brave. You don’t have to have the Banner part activated if you don’t want it, but it does need to show in the Notifications Tray without being blocked. Below are screenshots of my settings for both on Windows.


The “Automatic Rules” is what kept screwing my ads up on my PC. I knew I had toggled off Focus Assist and thought it was good. Fortunately I realized it was turning itself on and figured out how to stop it. As for the banner, I just got tired of it popping up in the corner all of the time, so I turned it off and noticed I kept getting ads. So yep, far less annoying but still got them coming in…so long as nothing changes.

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I don’t understand why running multiple browsers a problem. If I’m using two devices and using a browser in both of them than should I create a different account and different wallet for the other device? This discourages the use of brave rather than promoting it.

@Saoiray excellent summary

@yellowflash I think you misunderstood this:

One example is running multiple browsers with the same ID.

I believe what @Saoiray said was about the wallet payment Id, and the only way you could have the same in different devices is by cloning your HDD/SSD or doing a backup of your browser files (which usually fails) then installing them in another computer/laptop

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@yellowflash what you’re stating isn’t the issue. Perhaps I’ll edit to clarify since there’s a misunderstanding.The issue is having two browsers with the same exact wallet.

Whenever you install on your phone versus your computer versus anywhere else, they all are going to have different wallet IDs. If you clone this wallet ID into another browser it’s going to assume that it either is having an internal error or that there is some sort of security issue, such as fraud. There should only be one instance of every wallet.

A good example of a person who had an issue from something like that would be at the link below.

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Oh okay I get it now. I just assumed same person running multiple browsers was the issue somehow because one of my device got flagged recently for no good reason as I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Glad it’s not.

This makes sense. But I’ve just realised I have had Focus Assist turned on in my Windows 11, But I’m still getting Brave Rewards popups. Probably a bug - “Brave ignores Windows Focus Assist and still throws up Ad popups”.

@music it all depends on settings and what you’re up to. I’m also not sure if they modified it a bit in Windows 11 or not. I know the default aspect in Windows 10 was to block a lot of stuff, even turning itself on if you had shut it off unless you went in and disabled that automated part. It was a pain.

it all depends on settings and what you’re up to

My Focus Assist is on Alarms Only.

I had turned it on to do a Webex presentation a few weeks ago and forgot to turn Alarms Only Focus Assist off. My Brave Ad popups have still been coming up and earning BAT haha.

Heh, don’t know if you changed it on a Brave level only or found yourself a beneficial bug. Either way, it’s all good! haha

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@Saoiray Nicely explained sir, Thanks :ok_hand:t2: :ok_hand:t2: :+1:t2: :+1:t2: