The new Brave web browser and Payments automatically reward the websites their users visit the most with funds volunteered by each user. The more time a user spends on a given website, the more money is rewarded to that website. Time is literally money, and that means website loading performance matters more than ever.
Brave Software apparently believes its users should only pay for the product they’re getting. The “meter” for any given website only starts running against a reader’s ledger once the page has fully loaded. This includes all images, stylesheets, and synchronous scripts. (The load event.)
Websites that optimizing for response and loading times as well as page weight thus secure themselves that extra bit of funding from their readers as compared to their slower competitors. Readers get to enjoy a faster web experience with less waiting and increased device battery life for choosing these websites. For the first time websites will be paid by how fast they are rather than how much slow-to-load widgets, tracking, and advertisement they manage to tack on to it
Slower websites, on the other hand, may earn even less money with Brave Payments than one might expect as their readers will spend less time on the fully loaded page. Their readers can even bypass the payment tribute entirely if they click away or close the front page or an article before the page has fully loaded.
For the first time websites will be paid by how fast they are rather than how much slow-to-load widgets, tracking, and advertisement they manage to tack on to it.
We’re, of course, only talking about a second, if that, per reader here. Multiply that across millions of readers each visiting the website once–twice per day, and the seconds starts adding up. The minimum required time on a page in Brave for it to be counted is currently 8 seconds.
Websites that want to maximize their potential earnings from each Brave user wouldn’t need to look any further than the loading performance of their website to squeeze out some extra revenue.
News publishers have a long tradition of having bloated and slow websites. Brave may change more than just how we pay for news on the web, it may also drag the news publishing industry kicking and screaming to create faster websites in the process.