We have all been there: you are watching an interesting video on YouTube and halfway through the video a random 15 second advertisement starts to play. This example is just one of many reasons why people install an ad-blocker. However, the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla have found a different way to deal with advertisements: if you do decide to watch advertisements, you will get paid in tokens called Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).
To earn BATs, you will need to use a browser called Brave. This is a browser that blocks wasteful advertisements and trackers, and as result it claims to be two times faster than Chrome on a desktop. Besides blocking advertisements and trackers, users will be given the choice to opt-in to see advertisements. These advertisements will be privately matched to the user’s interests and anonymously confirmed. What is important is the fact that the user remains anonymous to all parties. However, any advertising measurement will be limited to the active tab, so ads in a background tab won’t count toward a user’s BAT allocation
The three parties involved in the BAT system are the advertisers, the publishers and the users. Advertisers acquire tokens and then package the tokens with ads. This combination is locked until a user views the advertisement on a publisher’s website. At this point the token is unlocked and a small part of its value is stored in the user’s digital wallet and the rest is forwarded to the publisher whose website ran the ad. The tokens obtained by the users can be spent in various ways: users may donate the tokens to a website to support the selected site. Alternatively, users may keep half of the tokens for themselves and give half of the tokens to a website they support. Of course there’s also an option of keeping all the tokens to yourself. If you have chosen to opt-out of advertisements, you will obviously not see any advertisements on the Brave browser and you will not receive any tokens.
All in all, I think BATs can have a major impact on people’s privacy and the online advertisement industry and I personally would be open to use the Brave browser in which I can decide to opt-in or opt-out of (paid) advertisements. Basic Attention Tokens currently have a value of around $0.19 per token and it will be interesting to see how the price will develop in the future when more parties become aware of the Brave browser and BATS. Please be aware though that this blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is in no means an investing advice.
For more information, check out the website of BAT
Hi Oscar, nice post! Personally, I never heard of this web browser before, but your post triggered me to do some research myself. I got really enthusiastic, but then I found out that 17 newspapers-publishing companies sent a letter to Brave, calling their business model illegal (O’Reilly, 2016). They state that Brave is, amongst other things, violating the publishers’ terms of use and giving users an unatuhorized access to their websites and that they are ready to take legal actions. Of course, this was in 2016 and I cannot find any sources about the status of the matter as of today. However, it raises an interesting question. Do you think that Brave’s business model should be illegal?
Personally, I agree with Brendan Eich (CEO Brave) that browsers should be more privacy friendly and that Brave should not be illegal. However, the growth of Brave might lead to websites finding a way to exclude Brave users from viewing their content. This would make it way less attractive to use and I do expect this to happen eventually. What do you think?
Source:
O’Reilly, L. (2016, April 07). ‘BLATANTLY ILLEGAL’: 17 newspapers slam ex-Mozilla CEO’s new ad-blocking browser. Retrieved October 09, 2017, from http://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-publishers-send-cease-and-desist-to-brave-browser-2016-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T
Interesting post! I just installed ad blocker a week ago in the hope of saying goodbye to annoying ads. However，when I saw the notion of “Brave”, the first thing that came to my mind is :” Is there really a necessity to create another browser merely for optional paid ads viewing?” I mean, there must be many other values that Brave could bring to users in order to convince them to make a switch (Richard S. 2017). Another thing that came to me is about the monitoring of users’ behavior. Whether users truly watched the opt-in ads is a issue that needs to be addressed, since it directly determines the ROI of advertising costs. Anyway, in my opinion, no matter how many user views and click rates is for a certain ad, the success lies in the content and quality of the ad. Word-of-mouth dissemmination would sound more reasonable and effective for me rather than paid ads which might attract a totally different user group——reward-driven but might not care much about the content.
Nevertheless, this whole new idea of selling users’ online attention and payment to publishers is intriguing and worth further discussion. At least the previous miraculous selling of $35m-worth Brave’s ethereum-based Basic Attention Token (BAT) within 30s proves it a upstart browser full of potential (Jonathan K. 2017). Let’s wait and see what’s his next move.
Sources:
https://medium.com/@richardspicer/why-im-not-yet-psyched-about-the-basic-attention-token-by-brave-21d70ea0dea8
https://www.coindesk.com/35-million-30-seconds-token-sale-internet-browser-brave-sells/
A very interesting new business model. I will definitely check out the browser and see how it works. I found a video about BAT on the internet where the founder further explains the concept, you should check it out!
. It is interesting to wee how using blockchain in onine advertising can change these annoying online advertisements and deliver key costumers insides to companies.