Ever heard of BAT? No, not that Bat in Gotham City. I’m talking about Basic Attention Token, a advertising utility that is going to revolutionize how people make money on the web. In order for me to properly talk about BAT, I’m going to have to discuss Brendan Eich and the Brave Browser. Brendan Eich is the creator of Javascript, you know, that fundamental programming language that is integral to the internet? Yeah. He also helped cofound the Mozilla project. Mozilla Firefox is one of the best internet browsers around. To be honest, I’ve been using Mozilla since at least 2006. It’s a great browser, and I used to use it (and Chrome) exclusively. However, a even better browser has come along, and its name is Brave. To make a long and complicated story short, some things happened and Eich left Mozilla to found his own browser.
Brave Browser is a privacy-centric browser. Remember the last time you bought a computer? And downloaded Chrome (or Mozilla) from IE, then added AdBlockPlus? Well now you don’t need to. Now there’s Brave, a browser that not only automatically blocks trackers and ads, (as well as automatically making HTTPS upgrades, blocking 3rd party Cookies, etc.) but also includes a micro-payment solution. Basically, instead of viewing annoying, malicious, or cryptojacking ads on your favorite website, you can donate BAT tokens every month to that website. (You can download Brave here now. You should.) For example, let’s say your favorite website is Youtube. You really like a certain video creator, but don’t want to watch the ads that make them money. Instead, you donate money to him through the BAT micro payment system each month. Pretty Cool right? It’s a new way for you to donate money to your favorite website or content creator!
Real quick, before I discuss the Culture changing goals of BAT, let me discuss the barest of the technical details. It is a Ethereum based ERC20 token, and worth aroundishhh 60 cents right this very moment at the time of this article being written. (Yeah. That was before the crash, as you can now tell. I wrote this a few weeks ago) There are one billion tokens in circulation, and 1.5 billion tokens in existence. (From Coin Market Cap)The ICO raised over 30 million dollars last year in 30 seconds. Yeah. 30 seconds. Much like bitcoin or most other digital tokens, you can send it from one wallet to another, HODL it for years, or trade it on an exchange like Binance. You need a Seed which you can never lose, a wallet on the Brave Browser, all that good stuff.
The goal of BAT is to provide a new advertising platform that does not rely on the status quo where you make money only because of Google, Facebook, (insert Third Party Ad system here), Pinterest, or Instagram ads and redirects. You make money because your fans intentionally donated money to you, much like a decentralized version of Patreon. I’m going to let the authors of the Basic Attention Token White Paper say it best with their Abstract.
Digital advertising is broken. The marketplace for online advertising, once dominated by advertisers, publishers and users, has become overrun by “middleman” ad exchanges, audience segmentation, complicated behavioral and cross-device use tracking, and opaque cross-party sharing through data management platforms. Users face unprecedented levels of malvertisements and privacy violations. Mobile advertising results in as much as $23 per month in data charges on the average user’s data plan, slow page loads, and as much as 21% less battery life. In response, over 600 million mobile devices and desktops (globally) employ ad blocking software and this number is growing. Traditional publishers have lost approximately 66% of their revenue over the past decade, adjusted for inflation. Publishers face falling revenue, users feel increasingly violated, and advertisers’ ability to assess effectiveness is diminished. The solution is a decentralized, transparent digital ad exchange based on Blockchain. The first component is Brave, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks third party ads and trackers, and builds in a ledger system that measures user attention to reward publishers accordingly. Brave will now introduce BAT (Basic Attention Token), a token for a decentralized ad exchange. It compensates the browser user for attention while protecting privacy. BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users and is denominated by relevant user attention, while removing social and economic costs associated with existing ad networks, e.g., fraud, privacy violations, and malvertising. BAT is a payment system that rewards and protects the user while giving better conversion to advertisers and higher yield to publishers. We see BAT and associated technologies as a future part of web standards, solving the important problem of monetizing publisher content while protecting user privacy. (from Brave WhitePaper)
It’s quite inspiring isn’t it? The BAT system seeks to reward both creators and users in an unprecedented system. If you dig into the Brave payment information, you can see that you can change the settings which determine who you donate money to. Only visit “The Onion” twice a month and don’t want to give money to them? Well, don’t. You can change your settings to begin automatic monthly payments to websites only after the fifth visit. Not only that, but before your wallet is “charged,” you can check the list of publishers it is planning to send Brave tokens to and take some off the list if you like. Oh, before I forget, Brave is also adding a function where you can opt in to see ads in exchange for BAT tokens. So, you can make a little money from watching ads in order to A). keep it, or B). give it to one of your favorite websites!
The best part is that this system is run algorithmically, not by humans. “Your monthly contribution is created using a computer algorithm which takes into account things like number of visits each site, the time spend on each page, etc. It does this securely and anonymously.” (from official F.A.Q. about BAT) This eliminates the fear of fraud with such a system. No one can control your revenue stream (like Google with Youtube). As long as you have loyal followers who love you, visit your site, and donate monthly, you will continue to have BAT tokens flow into your Publisher wallet. No one is going to take away your BAT because they think you don’t have enough views.
BAT flips the current advertising model on its head and throws it out the window. You are no longer a target, tracked by giant third party companies who comb through your data to predict what they can sell to you. No longer are you a “pawn in the game” of the great advertising machine. You are no longer a commodity. You are in control of who makes money off your viewership, and you give them your money. I sincerely believe BAT will be a game changer for the advertising industry. Between Brave and its BAT payment system, the “Big Bad Wolves” of the advertising industry should be scared. Don’t forget, this project is backed by the creator of Javascript! The man helped transform the internet with JS and Mozilla. If any of these new cryptocurrencies have a chance of being successful, I think BAT has a dang good fighting chance. The future of advertising is coming, and it’s giving control back to the people.