In 2018, internet net neutrality has been repealed and digital advertising has grown out of control. All time you are online using the Chrome browser, and Facebook is more money for companies like Google and Facebook trying to sell your data to advertisers.
Many of you will say well that’s the price of browsing the web, but now there is an alternative in the shape of the Brave browser and a crypto called Basic Attention Token (BAT).
The Brave Browser
Brave was created in early 2016 by Brendan Eich, a rather clever chap who created JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla. The Brave browser blocks all advertisements and trackers that plague the websites you visit daily, eliminating the need for any kind of ad blocking extension.
If you look at the graphic below you can see how the browser experience is twice as fast while also efficient in that it saves an average of 0.5GB of mobile data a month by not having to load ads.
Brave loads major news sites 2 to 8 times faster than Chrome and Safari on mobile. And Brave is 2 times faster than Chrome on desktop. Brave vs. Chrome on Android Tablet
It’s a great browser, and their recent Desktop version (Mac or PC compatible) is a worthy competitor to Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.
Basic Attention Token
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is an ERC20 Token based on the Ethereum Blockchain. It’s main goal is to provide a digital ad exchange to allow advertisers the ability to purchase ad space and user “attention” — the same product that Google and Facebook provide when selling ad space.
Brave wants all advertising revenues to be based on BAT. Advertisers will pay for ads using BAT and users will be compensated for viewing ads in BAT.
BAT represents a fundamental rethinking of the way digital ads are delivered. The current model depends on third-party tracking (tracking browsing history, cookies, and search queries) and middlemen that connect advertisers with users.
BAT removes the need for third-party tracking and middlemen by matching and delivering ads locally from an inventory catalog of available ads and offers.
Delivering ads this way has the benefit of keeping your browsing history private, as all data required for ad-matching never leaves your device. You also get to choose the types of ads you want, thus making ad targeting a thing of the past.
How does BAT integrate in Brave?
Up to now, publishers created content and ads paid the way, as you can see by the ads dotted around this very page. However, Internet ads are quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Ad blocking has grown significantly over the last few years. Now over 500 million people use software to stop ads on their mobile and desktop devices.
If things don’t change, smaller publishers could disappear and larger publishers’ staff will continue shrinking.
In the Brave browser, content creators can register their websites and social media accounts. Users of Brave can load BAT tokens into their wallet (included in the Brave browser) and choose to give a set amount of BAT to their favorite content creators each month.
Neither the readers nor the publisher need to do anything different. They just keep surfing and I just keep publishing. I don’t have to view any ads, yet I can still support my favorite content creators.
Basic Attention Token fixes underlying economic incentives by correctly pricing user attention, delivering on privacy compliance, user anonymity, and offering a disruptive digital advertising paradigm for content creators, advertisers and users.
BAT is a brilliant solution to a systemic problem, and Brave might just be the platform that brings it all together and makes a fast, ad free and privacy orientated web a thing of the future. Full disclosure, I am in the process of working with Brave to become a publisher on their platform and I will let you know how things go over the coming weeks and months.
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