Tutorial – Brave Payments – How to spend your BAT

Edit – December 19, 2018:

Brave has updated to a different UI engine (to full Chromium), and the following tutorial is no longer valid. Please check out the updated Brave tutorials here!

Today, Brave distributed the first batch of free BAT from their User Growth Pool (UGP)! This means that if you have Brave downloaded, you can get 30 BAT tokens for free! Follow the link for instructions on how to claim your free crypto! (Note: If you are not receiving the notification, try turning your Brave Payments in the Preferences on/off a few times).

Edit – Jan 18, 2018: Brave distributed their second round of UGP, totaling over $1 million in BAT!

So I have some BAT. How does Brave Payments work?

In a nutshell, Brave Payments is a way to passively support your favorite websites. Brave will take your visited websites and distribute to them your monthly contributions based on the time spent on each site. To view, go into Brave Preferences > Payments:

1. Turn on Brave Payments if you haven’t already.
2. Monthly Budget – This amount of BAT is what you will set to contribute to your visited websites (if you wish to do so). Since the value of BAT tokens fluctuates on a daily basis, you may see the USD value change periodically.
3. The Green Checkmark signifies that the website is a Verified Brave Publisher. These websites have already registered with Brave and will be aware of your BAT contributions. Basically, these are the peeps that know what’s up!
4. Percent Contribution is from the amount of your Monthly Budget that you will give to the website at the end of the month. This is automatically calculated from the amount of time you spend on each site.

Supporting only your Favorite sites

If you choose, you can also override the default contribution allocations by pinning your favorite sites. You’ll be able to allocate any amount to donate, anywhere from 1% to 100% (all) of your monthly contributions to individual sites.

1. Click the Pin to enable a constant contribution each month to your favorite site.
2. Set a custom contribution percent.

Disabling Payments

If there is a specific site or domain that you wish to NOT support, feel free to disable all contributions for that site.

1. Click the Switch to disable a site from your monthly contributions.

YouTube Channels

If you’ve visited YouTube recently, you’ll notice that the YouTube domain comes up as well as other individual YouTube Channels! I’ve personally deactivated payments for Youtube.com and have pinned payments for specific YouTubers. Basically, you can think about sending BAT to the YouTubers not only as a way to support them, but also to get their attention and eyes on Brave! They will have to verify their channel in order to redeem their BAT, so sending BAT to channels with large amounts of viewers can be a great way to get the word out!

1. Individual YouTube channels that you’ve visited on YouTube.com will show up as individual publishers. Select and Pin your favorite YouTubers to give them a constant monthly contribution!

Future of UGP

The BAT team has mentioned that since this is the very first distribution of the UGP, it will be relatively small compared to future batches. They are still testing it out and trying to find the best way to promote BAT and Brave.

If you have friends and family who aren’t using Brave yet, tell them about it and get them some free BAT!

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