I have now opened this topic so people can reply. Please keep it respectful.
On this, I have made several replies addressing various complaints or questions I have seen. I encourage a lot of you, especially people complaining about payout amounts, to check everything out.
Disclaimer
Hey all. Before I say much, let me remind everyone that I am just another user. I am indeed highly active here and do my best to help everyone, but I don’t work at Brave. So just keep that in mind.
Brave is a browser, first and foremost. While the Rewards feature is a nice bonus, it should NEVER be the primary or sole reason to use Brave. Unfortunately, some people treat it as if it were a crypto-mining or farming program. When their earnings don’t meet their expectations, they complain as though they’ve done actual work and are owed wages.
It’s important to understand that Rewards has no guaranteed minimum or maximum payout. To date, earning through Rewards requires little to no effort, which is why I often refer to it as “free money.” Some may debate this term, but the reality is simple: you aren’t providing personal information, clicking on ads, making purchases, or completing tasks. You just sign up, use the browser as usual, and earn passively.
If you don’t want notifications, you can disable them. This will reduce your earnings, but that’s entirely up to you.
Many people claim that BAT rewards per ad have decreased, with some even posting that ads now pay only 0.005 BAT, assuming this is less than before. However, these claims often indicate either a lack of attention to the details or a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation.
In reality, BAT payouts per ad have always varied, ranging from as little as 0.001 BAT to as much as 0.1 or even 0.5 BAT, depending on how much advertisers pay. To illustrate this, here are screenshots from 2020 and 2021 where users were complaining about ads paying as little as 0.001 or 0.005 BAT. These examples are easy to find online, and I’m sharing them to demonstrate that this is not just my opinion—it’s consistent with the history of Brave Rewards.
NOTE
Keep in mind Brave has always been transparent about everything. In fact, you can always go to https://sampson.codes/brave/ads/my_region/ to see what ad campaigns are in your area, what OS they are targeting, how many times you can see those ads, and how much they pay.
Big thing is to remember Brave Rewards pays us 70% of whatever they get paid. So yes, some months will be way more or less than others. Let’s take a serious and honest look at history here.
To do this, let’s take a glimpse through my own earnings history since I’ve been using Brave. Uphold has my information back through June of 2020. What can we see for my monthly earnings and averages?
I did screenshot of each monthly earning and put it into Paint, then did screenshot of all data together. I did this because I have personal transactions I didn’t want to share. Anyway, you’ll see my monthly earnings and then I’ll add it up and show a monthly average for that year.
When I say average monthly BAT, I’m taking all of my earnings and getting the average.
When I say average monthly USD I’m referring to the USD value that the received amount of BAT had at the time.
Average Monthly BAT = 8.14331
Average Monthly USD = $2.02
Average Monthly BAT = 2.14629
Average Monthly USD = $1.98
Average Monthly BAT = 21.73694
Average Monthly USD = $8.40
Average Monthly BAT = 9.67875
Average Monthly USD = $2.30
NOTE If you account for the outlier of very big payment in February 2023, then the actual average is 7.86089 BAT which was $1.68.
Average Monthly BAT earned = 6.593472308
Average Monthly USD = $1.45
Hopefully, you’ve noticed how much earnings can fluctuate. Some months had unusually high payouts that even I couldn’t explain—especially in 2022. If you started using Brave during that time and got used to those higher payouts, the more recent amounts might feel disappointing in comparison.
That said, the overall average has stayed around $2 per month for me here in the United States, give or take. Keep in mind, these values vary depending on your region and the available ad campaigns in your area.
Have payouts been lower in the past couple of months? Absolutely—they certainly feel that way.
However, remember that our payouts are directly tied to what Brave earns. If there are fewer ad campaigns, or if Brave has to offer discounts to attract advertisers, our rewards will decrease as a result. That said, these dips tend to be temporary, and payouts typically recover over time as new campaigns are launched.
Indeed. As stated before, Brave gives us 70% of the ad revenue they make. Perhaps when you saw that many ads before, the campaigns paid more and so we could profit a little better.
However, we have had a change that was announced and plays a big role in how much we will earn as well. Brave no longer pays for house ads. These are the ads about Brave’s own products and services.
This was announced in places like First to know: Some upcoming changes in Rewards 3.0 and then also carried over in announcements or discussions in places like my own topic at PSA: Current and upcoming changes to Rewards and Creators - #11 by Saoiray
House Ads were often low paying, but they were enough to pad earnings for sure. So like in the 600 ads or so seen, you may have seen 100 or so House Ads.
NOTE
It was shared by Luke Mulks (VP of Business Operations at Brave) that we ONLY see these house ads if there aren’t any other ads for us to see in that moment. In other words, if we have hit the view limits for all campaigns or something, that is when we see Brave’s house ads.
So if we do see a lot of house ads for Brave, then it just means there’s not a lot of campaigns in our area and/or we have viewed so many ads that we hit the limit.
Then, don’t participate? That’s the beauty of Brave and Rewards, it’s not forced. You can opt in if you want. You also can control things. So let’s say you want to earn but you don’t want to see ad notifications. You can go to Brave Rewards and turn off ad notifications but then allow the less annoying New Tab Page ads and/or Brave News ads. It may not be big earnings but it will be some extra here or there.
Your choosing to participate in Rewards is your way of saying you would like to support Brave. By viewing you earn whatever you get, but then you’re also pushing money to Brave. As you said, it’s not a lot. And we’re getting the bigger side of things.
But if you don’t want it on to support the browser, earn yourself, or even to help support Creators of the websites you visit via earning/tipping them, then you can just choose not to opt in.
I’m pulling some of this data from https://www.topdraw.com/insights/is-online-advertising-expensive/ but you can skim through the internet as much as you want and you’ll find numbers.
CPM = Cost per thousand impressions. This means it’s how much places pay for 1,000 people to see their ad.
Overall average cost of ads are $3-10 CPM. But they vary depending on type. For example, it also states:
Advertising on Google’s Display Network is very inexpensive when viewed within the CPM lens. We find that display campaigns average $0.50 – $4 CPM, with an average of $3.12.
That’s a huge range of pay!! Let’s break it down on each range. That means we’ll take the amount and divide by 1,000 to see how much they pay per ad:
We have to assume Brave is getting paid somewhere in between on those ranges. How much they charge precisely is something I don’t know and I’m sure will vary quite a bit.
Since we get paid 70% of what Brave gets, let’s see what 70% of each of those numbers would be:
At the time I’m writing this, 1 BAT = $0.24382
Let’s take the value of 1 BAT ($0.24382) and divide it by the numbers we just got. In other words, the 70% number so we can see how many ads we would have to view to get 1 BAT if they were all in that amount.
So you can see, on the low end it means we would have to see nearly 700 ads to get 1 BAT.
Of course, if they can charge an advertiser on the higher end, it means we could see as few as 35 ads to earn that same 1 BAT.
That’s a pretty big range. I’m not sure exactly what Brave is charging, but I wanted to show that what we’re getting doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I’m still waiting to hear back on more, but we should be seeing some new ways to earn on Rewards. For example, they talked about the Offer Wall on the BAT Roadmap.
On this they are saying there will be a variety of “quests” or perhaps special bonuses if we want to complete tasks. They also have talked about trying to get Pay With BAT going more and perhaps there being a “cash back” type of option in the future.
Unfortunately, not much has been said or shown on this yet. All I know is they are aiming to get it released here in 2025. Originally saying in the first quarter, so perhaps about February/March, but I know Brave often gets delayed on new things.
But new ways to earn for ourselves and Brave are on the way.
Yep, not worth it anymore. As I mentioned I only did this for the BAT. Many sites do not work even with Brave shields down. I have to use Firefox or Vivaldi to use them. hundred and hundreds of ads to only get 0.8 BAT is in no way worth all the ads. If the browser actually worked as well as the two mentioned I would support it. Was a time I even used to 15-17 BAT in a month. Now I can’t even get 1 single BAT. Not worth it.
I haven’t encountered any yet. Often only time people have issues are with extensions, changed settings, vpn, or whatever. But I know you have shared back last year that you had problems in different places. Just wish had been able to help you figure it out more. But was difficult when others didn’t have the same issues.
But indeed, if you’re not happy with it overall and just using for Rewards, it may not be the best fit.
You see screenshots I shared. We’ve all had some of the good months making that, but then occasional bad months too. Big thing that hurt was lot of regional changes and advertising after huge FTX issue and all toward the end of 2022. Especially as Uphold and Gemini had made a lot of regional restrictions for people to be able to connect and earn.
Brave has been making adjustments and building back up, but it definitely takes time. Good changes are supposedly on the way, but we’ll see how it goes. Tbh, I have a feeling I’m not going to like what they are doing. Yet until I see more, it’s hard to say.
The above is a reply from someone on Reddit and I wanted to add it here as this is true. For those not aware, we can see Brave-Initiated Purchases of BAT at their transparency page over at https://brave.com/transparency/ where it also shows how many active users there are, how many ad campaigns are in each, etc.
Brave-intiated BAT purchases often gives us a little insight as to how Rewards payments are going to be. This is because as advertisers pay Brave, we then see Brave use that money to grab the BAT that is going to come to us.
For much of Brave’s history, they have bought between 100,000 and 400,000 BAT each time, with some months even surpassing 1 million BAT.
If we look at the most recent purchase, Brave only purchased 54,326 BAT. This is very small compared to prior months.
While not an exact science, it tells us that payouts will likely be small…or at least the more recent one that just passed was so small that they didn’t need to replenish much.
Let’s take a look. Comparing such as like 2022 to 2024, we can see there are a lot less campaigns now than there was then. For example
So yes, this is as I have been saying, we get paid based on what Brave is paid. If they are having substantially less campaigns, we get less money.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
It’s a free bonus, agreed.
Is it true though that regions outside US will now see less 3rd-party ads as some say?
Ok, never mind.
I checked my region and it’s only Brave and Karate Combat ads.
That probably explains it…
I have 4 devices with two different versions of the browser, the device with the old version allows me to earn about 1 BAT per month, in those with the new version I have seen a total of more than 200 ads. The payment received is only 1.02 BAT. In 2023, 2022 I was also earning 5 BAT, in mid-2024 just over 1 BAT, with the last update 0.200 BAT. If I downgrade the app I go back to earning 1 BAT per device
So what is explained in the images is not a real solution
@Usernamex not true about it being older paying better. I’m not sure which device types are on each nor how active you are on them. And “seeing more than 200 ads” is nothing. If you see my explanation, it can take up to 700 ads to get to 1 BAT. It all depends on the campaigns in your area.
And also as has been explained, every campaign has view limits. So like this one below pays 0.01 BAT each time it shows. The view limits are 4 / — / — / 4. This means it can be seen a maximum of 4 times in one day, but then also for a maximum of 4 times for however long the campaign exists.
Then we have the one below, which is running for a month.
It has View Limit of 4 / — / — / 26 and pays 0.005 BAT each time it’s viewed.
This means we can see these ads 4 times a day, for a total of 26 times viewed. It started back in December and ends in January.
And as said about House Ads, we have this one below that pays nothing and can show 2 times per day, up to a maximum of 30 views. This means we can see the limit of the ad campaign in as little as 15 days even though the campaign lasts for 307 days.
It’s also important to see ad campaigns show up for only specific campaigns.
It’s possible your older might be because of its OS or just the view limits based on available campaigns, especially if you’re using one a lot more actively than the other.
You see what I shared about my payments back in prior years as well. I have also given all the explanations above as to why we would see changes now. Depending on your region, there are less ad campaigns. We no longer get paid for Brave’s house ads as well. We just get what was always promised, which is 70% of the ad revenue.
I’m guessing you didn’t read everything I said in full detail. Please do so
Thank you for your detailed responses to these perennial complaints & questions.
Personally, I look upon the “B.A.T.” feature as you have - it’s free money!
People complain about everything, even when it’s free &, sometimes, especially when it’s free - they come to expect it as a right, instead of a bonus for using a specific browser.
AFAIK, no other browser company has this feature, so, people saying they’ll stop using it if their expectations are not fulfilled are ‘cutting their noses off to spite their faces’.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Stop complaining, folks, it’s free, & before Brave B.A.T., YOU were the product, & many multinationals earned money from you.
To @saoiray, your efforts are greatly appreciated, by me, at least.
To earn via browser ads, none that I can think of. However, there has long been options of things like Microsoft Rewards. So on that you could sign up and have it linked to your browser. Then as you do web searches or perform various tasks, even playing games on your PC or Xbox, and you earn points. Then could redeem those points for gift cards.
But the key there is that Microsoft is doing it to collect your data and create profiles on you.
What I am a bit worried about is what Brave is planning on doing with the Offer Wall. Parts of it sounds like it is basically going to imitate what Microsoft Rewards has been doing. So complete some surveys, do some tasks, etc. I’m not even sure if some of the tasks will be to try to get people to do searches on Brave Search, much like Microsoft Rewards tries to get people to do searches on Bing.
With Microsoft Rewards, once you get to level 2, which can be done in a month, you can earn 250 points per day by doing searches on Bing. At 5 points per search, that means people would have to do 50 searches to hit that limit.
In looking, I see that it shows me things like a $5 Amazon gift card for 6,500 points. So would be something like 1,300 points = $1. Meaning doing 50 searches per day for a little more than 5 days would get you $1. You could do some of the cash back, trivia, etc to also earn.
And I know there are actually a lot of other browsers out there at least claiming to let you earn. There’s typically a big catch in all of them though, whether it be by them trying to force you to buy things or if it’s just complete invasion of privacy.
Guess big thing I wanted to do on the follow-up is saying that other browser companies are out there to pay people. But it’s like you said, that they do it by making the user and user data the product.
