Attention is a new commodity that has been monetized by giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. But those who provide this commodity by spending their valuable time, knowledge, and resources get nothing in return.
It has been a concern and issue was debated but there was no transparent and honest mechanism available to measure the value of attention and to compensate attention/content providers.
Fortunately, blockchain based several initiatives in last two years have started addressing this issue. One of them is Basic Attention Token (BAT).
This is what they say in their own words
"Basic Attention Token radically improves the efficiency of digital advertising by creating a new token that can be exchanged between publishers, advertisers, and users. It all happens on the Ethereum blockchain. The token can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on the Brave platform. The utility of the token is based on user attention, which simply means a person’s focused mental engagement. "
There are three players in this game
- Publishers- content generators who attract users to a particular website to spend their time to read, to watch, to comment, to play etc
- Advertisers - who wish to sell their products to potential users
- Users - Users who while consuming the content from publishers are exposed to the products of advertisers and so are potential buyers of products. Buy thie interactions they also provide good feedback/information about the product or potential products.
Now how the BAT will work
- Any publisher can get registered with them and verified. In this process they will list their websites onto BAT platform.
- Any user who browse the website through Brave browser -his time spent is recorded for that website. Based on that the web ranking is determined
- Advertisers will get access to this web ranking and they will select websites where they will show their adds. The content developers will be paid from the adds
- Users are also rewarded according to their attention
Seems a good system. They have already started paying for content providers. But I think more info about platform operation, current state, projections etc is needed before making any comment about its future potential.
Million Dollar BAT Giveaway to Brave Users Now Paid Out to Rewarded Content Creators