Over the past 18 months, our nonprofit has made nearly $2,000 from people who are using the Brave Browser to visit freeCodeCamp.org.

In this article, I'm going to tell you about the Brave Browser and show how it works.

I'll also help you decide whether it's worth registering your website or YouTube channel as a Brave publisher.

And if you want to register so you can get paid, I'll show you how to do that, too.

But first, I want to temper your expectations. Unless you have a huge audience, Brave is unlikely to be a significant proportion of your income.

For some perspective:

1. freeCodeCamp.org is one of the top 2,000 most-visited websites
2. And our audience is mostly developers, who are much more likely to use the Brave Browser than a less-technical audience

In other words, your mileage may vary.

A quick note on my objectivity

Before anyone accuses me of using my influence to drive up the value of Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency: we sold all of freeCodeCamp's BAT before publishing this.

We transferred it into freeCodeCamp's bank account, where it will help us cover this month's server costs.

By the way, if you want to support freeCodeCamp, I recommend you donate to us directly. This is where a vast majority of our nonprofit's budget comes from. The resources we get from Brave certainly help, but they don't even begin to cover the costs of running a nonprofit like ours.

What exactly is the Brave Browser?

Brave is an open source browser with a built-in ad blocker.

Brave was created by Brendan Eich - that same developer who created the JavaScript programming language back in 1995.

The big idea behind Brave is that instead of supporting websites by viewing their banner ads, you can pay them directly through your browser.

Here's how it works:

1. You use money to buy Brave's Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency, and that BAT goes into your Brave wallet.
2. Brave will keep track of how much time you spend on each website or YouTube channel.
3. Then Brave will divide up your BAT and pay websites and YouTube channels each month based on how much time you spent using them.

This means instead of making a bunch of small individual donations to the dozens of websites and YouTube channels you use each month, you can just load money into Brave. Brave will then passively distribute that money for you.

Brave also has a manual "tipping" feature.

How do you make money from Brave?

First, you have to register your website or YouTube channel as a publisher. You can register as a Brave publisher here.

Then each month, if people are using Brave to browse your website or watch your videos, Brave will send you their Basic Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency through a service called Uphold.

In order to actually withdraw that BAT from Uphold (and convert it into another currency), you have to first create an Uphold account.

Note that this involves filling out forms and sharing a lot of sensitive information, such as your bank information, social security number, your ID, and your photo.

How can you can try out the Brave Browser itself?

Brave is free and open source. You don't have to pay money to use it.

But if you do put money into your Brave wallet, Brave will share 95% of that with the websites you visit. (Brave keeps 5% of it as a transaction fee).

If you install Brave using this link, Brave says they'll donate $5 to freeCodeCamp. Brave says - rather vaguely - that you have to "use the browser (minimally) over a 30 day period" in order for freeCodeCamp.org to get the $5. So I guess try to use it at least a little each day.

There are some other interesting aspects of Brave, too. For example, you can voluntarily view Brave's own ads - which are more anonymized than traditional ad network ads. Brave will then pay you a small amount of Basic Attention Token in exchange for your attention.

Brave's approach of replacing more intrusive ads on websites with more privacy-minded ads of their own is still a controversial one. But it could eventually pressure some of the worst actors in the "ad tech" space to become less intrusive themselves.

Does Brave have a bright future?

Over the past 2 years, aside from a few spikes, the value of Brave's BAT cryptocurrency has been around US $0.20 per token:

I don't know anyone working at Brave, and I don't have any information about their company that isn't already public.

According to Crunchbase, Brave hasn't raised any money since June of 2017, when they had one of the only successful ICOs in history, selling $35 million worth of BAT in less than 30 seconds.

It's possible they may not need to raise additional funding if they are making enough money through BAT and their operations.

If anything, Brave seems well-poised to grow. Google plans to essentially kill ad-blocker Chrome extensions. This may cause more people to switch over to a browsers with built-in ad blockers, like Brave.

How are your Brave earnings so far?

If you've been a Brave publisher for a while, I encourage you to share your numbers. How much have you all made from Brave so far?

I hope this guide has been a helpful resource for you. Happy coding.