Hi this is Jimmy, VP of Services and Operations here at Brave. Thanks for this question, as it comes up from time to time. The rewards per Brave Ad are not fixed. They reflect 1) How much the advertiser in a particular campaign for a particular region is willing to pay for impressions/outcomes and 2) BAT prices. However, sometimes these values per ad can also be “sticky”. That is, based on the time campaigns are committed to and setup, it may take time for them to adjust to new BAT prices in our system. In addition, for some ads, we don’t fully know the value at the time of delivery. For instance, Brave always rewards on attention, i.e. viewing the ad, but may only get paid on delayed purchases, etc. In this case, it may take the system a while to figure out the correct value of the ads, and we adjust accordingly. But we usually estimate high, to the benefit of users, and if there is any additional BAT that should go out at the end of the month, we add those to the monthly payouts.
To answer the follow ups from @plasmi :
"Some users get 0.005 BAT. Does anyone have a theory for the instability?" The prices for different campaigns fall into several buckets, and that is one of them. What can sometimes be confusing is that certain users can see one bucket repeat so often as to assume that is the standard value for a Brave Ad, when in reality, it can definitely fluctuate.
"Some moderators have said in other posts that the stock markets’ instability causes the giving to change, but it was at $1.6/BAT once and they still gave 0.01 BAT/ad."
Quite right, and this represents the “stickiness” of how the system currently works that I mentioned earlier. Even though BAT at the time of this writing is down from that peak, it is still much higher than in some previous months, and many campaigns are adjusting to reflect that.
The team is actively working on ways of making the system respond more quickly to these changes and lots of exciting work on THEMIS: https://brave.com/themis-update-2/ will help to make these changes clearer and less confusing.
UPDATE:
I dug in with the team here and did notice that, related to some of these delivery issues over the last few days, some campaigns were indeed over-corrected, especially the affiliate ones. For all the reasons stated above, they may still have different values than previously, but the difference should be less significant now. Restarting your browser will help to ensure that you get a new catalog with updated values. If we notice that some users are still short of BAT given these changes, we will make sure to square up the differences for those users at the end of month payout. Thanks to everybody for their patience, vigilance and support, and sorry for the inconvenience.