At a cursory glance, the only relationship you may notice between BAT, the Basic Attention Token, and the Brave browser is that both are related to advertising. When you take a closer look, however, the two are very much connected. You can use the BAT token with the Brave browser to support websites, and the two were created to seamlessly integrate. Because of this, an understanding of one requires a comprehension of the other, as well.
The Brave browser aims to deliver privacy as you browse. It blocks trackers and ads that learn about you without your knowledge and sometimes even push malware. Essentially, Brave protects you as you browse without any effort on your part.
The Basic Attention Token, BAT, is designed to improve digital advertising efficiency via a token that users, advertisers, and publishers can all exchange using the Ethereum blockchain. You can use the token on the Brave platform for a range of attention-based and advertising services, and its utility is based on the attention of users.
Why Were BAT and Brave Created?
The team behind BAT and Brave saw that the world of digital advertising was filled with fraud, trackers, and middlemen. They noticed that users are being taken advantage of, publishers are hurting, and advertisers are losing out. The team cites that as much as 50 percent of the typical mobile data consumption for the average user goes to trackers and ads, costing them up to $23 each month. Ads reduce the phone battery life by up to 21 percent and take about 5 seconds to load on mobile devices. Additionally, user privacy is violated; large media sites that have as many as 70 trackers and malware have increased 132 percent in a single year.
For publishers, the current system does not work, with Google and Facebook taking 99 percent of growth and 73 percent of ad dollars. The BAT website also cites that revenue has recently decreased 66 percent and bots caused $7.2 billion in fraud in just the last year. The above problems also lead to more than 600 million desktops and phones using ad-blocking programs, which hurts publishers’ profit.
Finally, advertisers lose out a due to lack of information. They also have to suffer from poor targeting, which hurts the ROI of their ads, and marketers can be fooled by fake websites that commit fraud.
How Do Brave and BAT Work Together?
Brave is an open-source browser focused on privacy that is also quick and blocks trackers and malvertisements. It also has a ledger system anonymously capturing user attention, so publishers get rewards directly. BAT can be the key to getting various services via the Brave platform and will be used and exchanged by users, advertisers, and publishers. The token’s utility comes from a user’s mental engagement on an ad.
Together, the process is seamless. The Brave browser sees where users spend the most time and then uses this information to calculate the proportional reward for each publisher using BAT. This provides transparency as well as efficiency in digital advertising via the blockchain.
To function, Brave monitors user attention in an anonymous manner. It then uses this information to reward the publishers using BATs. The private data of users never leave their devices, guaranteeing privacy. Additionally, users get rewards for their attention with BATs. Because of the improved targeting, advertisers not only know where their money goes but also get a higher ROI.
Who Created BAT ?
There is a great team behind BAT, most importantly, founder Brendan Eich who created Javascript and also Co-Founded Mozilla and the Firefox browser.
How Do BAT and Brave Help Users, Publishers, and Advertisers?
Users can either use the Brave browser and say goodbye to ads and malware or opt in to receive fewer ads that are more targeted to their interests and have a significantly lower risk of malware. Publishers get more revenue since fraud and the middlemen are reduced. Finally, advertisers receive improved data on what they spend their money on.
Everyone involved also experiences a high level of privacy and reduced ad fraud thanks to improved client-side integrity, transparency via the open-source nature, and cryptography.
How Does Brave Measure Attention?
The key to this entire process is measuring a user’s attention, which is done in real-time as users view content and ads in the active tab. Every ad gets an Attention Value based on the pixels in view and incremental duration in proportion to the amount of relevant content before the user directly engages with the ad. As the system grows, it will define additional anonymous models of a cost-per-action nature. Based on the data, ads get anonymously matched to customer interests with help from local machine learning algorithms, improving the user experience.
Brave plans to work closely with advertisers and publishers to come up with the best practices for measuring user attention. Potential metrics include assigning points based on the length of the view or using the total number of views for advertising content within a given number of seconds.
How Are BATs Exchanged?
The largest number of BATs go to the publishers in the form of ad revenue. Users also receive some BATs as a reward for viewing ads. They can then use these BATs for premium services or content within the Brave platform. Advertisers pay BATs to place their ads. There is also the option for users to donate BAT to publishers, something that the team behind Brave feels many will do.
How to Purchase BAT?
You are not able to purchase BAT with “Fiat” currency so you will need to first purchase another currency – the easiest to buy are Bitcoin or Ethereum which you can do at Coinbase using a bank transfer or debit / credit card purchase and then trade that for BAT at an exchange such as Binance.
Register at Coinbase
For first time buyers of crypto currency, we recommend that you use Coinbase to make your first purchase – its easy to use, fully regulated by the US government so you know it is one of the safest and most reputable places to purchase cryptocurrency from. Coinbase offers the ability to purchase Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum with a credit or debit card or by sending a bank transfer. The fees are higher for cards but you will receive your currency instantly.
You will have to carry out some identity verification when signing up as they have to adhere to strict financial guidelines.
Make sure you use our link to signup you will be credited with $10 in free bitcoin when you make your first purchase of $100.
To get started, click the “Sign up” button where you will be taken to a registration form where you will need to enter your name, email and choose a password.
Purchase Ethereum
In Coinbase, visit the “Buy / Sell” tab at the top, select “Ethereum”, choose your payment method and enter the amount you wish to purchase – you can either enter a US Dollar amount or a number of Ether.
You will then be asked to confirm your transaction, if paying with a card you might have to complete a verification with your card provider. Once that’s complete, your Ethererum will be added to your account.
Purchase BAT at an Exchange
BAT is available on a wide number of exchanges, we recommend using Binanace. You can now send your Ether over to Binance to make your purchase of BAT, take a look at our review of Binance here to see how to signup and purchase on their exchange.
Can You Already Use Brave?
The Brave browser is already available, and a great deal of the infrastructure that the team needs to deploy BAT on the back end is already “code complete.” This means it is already in place. In fact, the team already uses it to distribute the donations among publishers depending on customer attention. At the moment, you can get the Brave Browser for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux.
Conclusion
Using the Basic Attention Token, Brave can provide benefits to everyone involved, including users, advertisers, and publishers. Advertisers should see an improvement in their returns, while publishers get more ad revenue and less-frustrated users. Users will save money on data, save time spent waiting for ads to load, and not have to worry as much about malware. Once fully deployed, Brave and BAT seem like an excellent solution for many of the problems currently plaguing digital advertising.
4 Comments
You can buy this at Coinbase for fiat currency now – ignore that part.
How do I withdraw my BAT?
You can’t withdraw BAT. just use it as browser currency.
Where and how do I use BAT, and how do I exchange it for other coins?