There are a lot of eye on the cryptocurrency industry. People are looking for actual use cases for tokens. What purpose do they serve and how can they change people's lives?
In short, many are seeking real world use cases.
How about paying for HBO or Hulu with tokens? This is now becoming a reality.
The other day, the Brave Network announced they partnered with the TAP network to enable payments of the BAT tokens. The network includes 250,000 brands and merchants.
According to the release, the Brave browser has 12 million monthly active users who opted in to their rewards platform. This pays people to click on ads as they appear in the browser.
https://brave.com/brave-and-tap-network-partnership-connects-consumers-and-brands-via-blockchain/
What we are seeing is a completely new concept in advertising. The program pays out 70% of the advertising revenue to the users. This allows individuals to benefit from the ads they see as opposed to a centralized platform such as Facebook or YouTube.
This is likely to be an advertising model that gets implemented throughout the Internet. It is also something that will have to come from outside the established players.
The present Internet silos have a lot to lose. They rake in billions in advertising dollars, something their shareholders are not wanting to give up. In other words, they will have to hold onto whatever they can.
Google is obviously one of the biggest companies in this realm along with Facebook. The Brave model is a threat to their way of doing business.
YouTube essentially is nothing more than an advertising platform. It is free to use yet the company puts ads in each video. With billions of views, this can amount to some real money.
This is opening the door for platforms such as 3speak. Here we can see a way to differentiate from the existing system by paying both the content creator and the viewer most of the advertising dollars. Just like Brave provided the proof of concept, we can not advance it to the next level.
In short, this is a model that is working. Online, 12 million people is not a tremendous amount yet it is a powerful starting point. The growth rate of Brave is astounding with them only passing 10 million users near the end of last year.
With the use of cryptocurrency, we are seeing a way to ensure that users benefit from the advertising dollars the platform generates. While the days of experimentation are early, the use of tokens alters who is a stake holder in the platform. We now have the ability to reward all who have an interest, not just the platform shareholders.
Value online is derived from the network effect. Ultimately, it comes down to the users who are the value builders. However, as we see things now, they are not the ones who receive the monetary benefit. Brave is the first large scale success story that alters that pattern.
These are the lines of thinking that are needed when setting up new platforms. The team behind 3Speak already noted how their intention is to divide up the advertising dollars between the viewer, content creator, and the platform itself. Since there is the goal of becoming a DAO, the platform take is there to cover the costs of running the system.
Brave is already showing the ability to alter the eCommerce landscape. They key is in the mechanism for distributing the tokens. Mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency is only going to come after there are ways for people to earn the tokens as opposed to buying in. Brave shows how this can be done.
While this is not likely a path to riches, it is a model for people to start to pay some of their everyday expenses. Down the road, Brave could be just one of a couple dozens ways an individual will be rewarded for his or her activity. If these tokens are then able to offset some of the bills that come in, it is a winning formula.
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Posted via Steemleo