Blockchain promises to revolutionize countless fields, with its inherent characteristics of decentralization, trustless executions and resistance against manipulation. The traditional advertising system is plagued with inefficiency, complexity and fraud. Basic Attention Token (BAT) aims to solve this, with its “proof of attention” incentivizing mechanism powered by Brave browser, resulting in creation of a transparent and decentralized ad market. The utility token itself is issued on the Ethereum blockchain and is used for exchange of services between publishers, advertisers and users. BAT has a working product, a legitimate use case and wide adoption.
Problems with Traditional Advertising
The issues with traditional advertising are intrusion, inefficiency, proliferation of malware, breaching of user privacy, high cost, susceptibility to manipulation, inaccurate metrics measurement (CPM /cost per click) and fraud etc. For these reasons, traditional advertising brings little to no incentive to ad viewers, instead wasting their resources, time, downgrading their experience and actually harming their devices, in some cases. As a result, people apply multiple ad blockers, skip ads and deploy protection against tracking, which results in ads not being delivered, irrelevant ads delivery, not being viewed properly and simply not fulfilling their purpose.
How Basic Attention Token (BAT) tackles this issue?
Basic Attention Token (BAT) business model relies on giving users a share of this advertising, so that they are willing to view targeted ads, while protecting their privacy and retaining the quality of their experience. Basic Attention Token (BAT) project considers “user attention” as a commodity and rewards them proportionally with the native BAT token, which is used for exchange of services on the network and is tradable on all major exchanges. Users can view ads on the associated Brave browser, which blocks all other ads and trackers by default. This results in a private and secure experiences for the users. The native Brave browser also has embedded machine learning algorithms to determine the ads to deliver, based on the user’s history and past behavior. However, private data doesn’t leave the device. For publishers, it results in improved revenue and better analytics, since ads running on blockchain systems are less susceptible to automatic clicking and other forms of fraud. For advertisers, it significantly lowers the cost, guarantees that actual users are viewing ads and allows better targeting of consumer segments.
Basic Attention Token (BAT) project is lead by a competent team and is being developed actively. The project has shown high rates of adoption by publishers and advertisers, and interest from the users. However, the system currently isn’t truly decentralized and traditional advertising still holds the majority of the share, on the Internet.