Hi everyone. This crypto highlight article will cover an upcoming cryptocurrency with large ambitions: the Basic Attention Token, or BAT for short. The BAT, along with its companion product the Brave internet browser, aim to change digital advertising forever. Let's cover what the BAT does.
Digital Advertising is Broken
According to Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and the leader of the BAT Project, online advertising is broken now.
Online advertising was once much simpler. It consisted of Advertisers, Publishers, and Users. [It] has evolved into an opaque and inefficient marketplace.
—Brendan Eich, BAT Project
In many ways, that's true. Currently, we see many fraudulent ads all over some websites, harming the user experience and maximizing our data bills. As such, many users have opted to use Ad Blockers to completely block out ads and trackers, because of the extra privacy protection this provides.
However, this has negatively affected the advertising industry as a whole, and there seemed to be no compromise allowing for cooperation between advertisers, website owners, and the users. Basic Attention Token claims to be the solution to this massive problem, integrating digital advertising into an anonymous distributed blockchain utilizing the BAT cryptocurrency. Let's see how it does this.
How does BAT work?
According to the official website, "The Basic Attention Token is the new token for the digital advertising industry. It pays publishers for their content and users for their attention, while providing advertisers with more in return for their ads." But what exactly does this mean?
First of all, the BAT splits off of the network into three "classes": the users, the publishers, and the advertisers. Let's explore each class and see how the BAT affects them.
Users
Should users choose to opt-in to advertising, they get paid with BAT tokens/cryptocurrency for their ad viewing. BATs cooperate with the Brave Browser, a new browser created just for this purpose that anonymously/privately monitors user attention. This provides a nice incentive for users to enable advertising and view ads.
Publishers
Publishers and website owners also receive BATs when users receive BATs. As a user gives some of their attention to an ad, the user and the publisher are rewarded with BATs. This provides a fair incentive to publishers to place ads on their site.
Advertisers
Advertisers pay BATs to get their ad seen. Their ads now target a better audience, the network has reduced fraud, and advertisers can get more users' attention leading to a better return-on-investment (ROI) for them.
How anonymous/private is it for users?
This is also an important question, as using a transparent/public blockchain may worry some users about their privacy. However, BAT claims to have a solution to this as well, by making most user interactions local and privatized. Let's have a look.
Target Matching
Today, when you view a Google Ad, your interests/viewing habits are automatically streamed to Google's servers and recorded there, which is highly detrimental to our anonymity/privacy. Instead of using a similar system, BAT uses local machine learning algorithms (that take place on your computer) to match you with ads you might like.
Anonize Algorithm
BAT also says that user privacy is protected with the usage of the ANONIZE Algorithm. Anonize is based on "a new cryptographic technology that ensures only survey targets can respond, and only once, while unconditionally guaranteeing anonymity." (source)
Cryptocurrency Market Value
BAT is currently trading at just over a quarter (25 cents), with a market cap of $0.265B, which is remarkably close to Steem's.
BAT's official website is available here. As always, do the appropriate research before investing in any cryptocurrency!
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