You know the feeling.
It usually follows a spark of genuine interest, the inspiring moment of unknowingly delving past your fifth hour web-sleuthing hobby ideas by clicking on the next link.
It’s that face-twitching, deflated moment when your eyes are accosted by flashes of advertisements sacrifice your enthusiasm to the spawn of Google Ad’s hoard. The article you came to read lags behind, apologetic, as it too is but a mere mortal in a god’s content game.
“Digital advertising is broken.” -Brave [1]
The Brave Browser and Basic Attention Token (BAT) offer us a new path: where users have control, advertising is more efficient, and publishers see more revenue.
Users
Browsing the web today is like wearing an itchy holiday sweater. There you are, looking into how to clean airbrushes, until that auto-playing video ad — like a sudden jab of wool fiber — wrests shameful remembrance of the cost for exploring your interests: your eternal sou-*ahem* attention.
And of course, your money.
That’s right, you may be paying as much as 23 USD per month in data charges to receive mobile advertisements. All that activity dumps molasses on your web-surfing sails Boston style — gooping up the Ship of Curiosity you set out on, and draining your wallet, energy, and time.
In the end, we’re all users. We’d just like to be less used.
Brave allows you to take the sweater off. By making users active participants in the advertising space, the browser overturns decades of ad-tech structures that’ve left us mired in more cookies than a Keebler factory, with no savory baked goods to show for it. Brave gives you real cookies.. in a way.
The browser facilitates purchasing ads, tracks your activity while protecting privacy, and rewards you for your time with a 70% share of the ad-buy in Basic Attention Token (BAT) — which can be exchanged to get that stack of Soft Batch.
(Technically, you earn virtual BAT or vBAT, which is realized into BAT if you verify your Brave Rewards account through Uphold, or soon, Gemini).
You can also use your BAT to tip websites, including specific posts on sites like Twitter and Reddit — adding a new layer of engagement similar to likes or upvotes, but with potentially catalytic differences. BAT may grow to be a more credible like, as you can’t buy Soft Batch with likes. Even better, we can verify the BAT was sent by a real person.
As the token is adopted, you could pay BAT to share paywalled content with friends, send super-comments, or participate in communities requiring minimal BAT payments to comment at all — to reduce comment abuse.[1] Alongside swag, over time the use cases may well proliferate as Brave builds its own decentralized exchange aggregator, and search engine.
If those options don’t suffice, you may use your BAT in the rapidly developing world of decentralized finance (DeFi), which has been exhilarating to learn about. I look forward to sharing more, yet for now I’ll merely offer that BAT is usable on major defi protocols, “including Oasis, Compound, Aave and Coinlist,” in “token swaps, derivatives, liquidity pools, lending, and saving.”[2]
Publishers
Whether you’re a news site with millions of readers or just beginning to monetize your tabletop wargaming hobby, you know: creating content is one thing, getting paid for it is another. Brave notes, “traditional publishers have lost approximately 66% of their revenue over the past decade, adjusted for inflation.”[1] Moreover, gauging where users arrive to your content from is increasingly challenging in a sea of tracking blockers.
Brave Browser improves attribution by providing browser-level data on user activity privately and securely. The white paper outlines a “concave score” metric which rewards publishers for the amount of time a user has their page open and is active. Combined with tipping publishers directly, this feature has opened streamlined sources of revenue while providing more nuanced page analytics. As of January 2021, “Brave users have rewarded their favorite publishers and creators by contributing 26 million BAT to them.”
Creators can verify their Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, Vimeo, GitHub, or website with Brave to enable user contributions. With 9.8 million daily active users as of publishing this piece, and over 29 million monthly active users — Brave is well worth including in your quest to paint miniatures full-time.
Which brings us to the bots.
Advertisers
Planning out a marketing campaign today can be like finding out how many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop just to be let down by “beep boop, no center, try again.”
A study by Adobe found about “28% of web traffic showed strong ‘non-human signals,’ leading the company to believe the traffic came from bots or click farms.” Hinting at one type of ad fraud that describes cyber criminals creating, “malicious bots that produce bogus websites that fool advertisers.”[1] The Business Intelligence report cited by Brave warned in 2016 that bot-led ad fraud would cost advertisers 7.2 billion USD by years end. Though challenging to fully measure, some estimate the cost of ad fraud at $87 billion by 2022 while the Word Federation of Advertisers predicts “ad fraud will become the biggest market for organized crime by 2025, worth $50 billion.”
Brave offers a different way forward, a new platform (Brave Browser) and unit of exchange (BAT) for advertising and content publishing. In lieu of legacy metrics like Clicks Per Minute, Brave introduces attention itself as the foundation of ad-tech’s future. Detailed in their white paper, the Basic Attention Metrics provide more reliable and more data-rich solutions for advertisers and publishers while securely maintaining privacy and user control.
“Attention is measured as viewed for content and ads only in the browser’s active tab in real time. The Attention Value for the ad will be calculated based on incremental duration and pixels in view in proportion to relevant content, prior to any direct engagement with the ad. We will define further anonymous cost-per-action models as the system develops.” [1]
As of February 2021, Brave Ads had a 9% click-through rate on average, much higher than the 2% rate ad campaigns typically receive.[2] For example, Verizon’s Brave Ads campaign got 23.8 million ad views, 8% blended CTR, with 57% of those click-throughs spending more than ten seconds on the page. Nexo saw a 15.8% CTR, and Blockfi earned twice as much revenue per user compared to Google. More case studies available here.
What will your Brave story be?
Alongside earning it, you can buy ⟁BAT on the following exchanges. Note that I’m not a financial advisor, and it is up to you to do your own research (DYOR) before investing in any cryptocurrency or token.
If you use the referral links below to signup and buy or sell $100 USD of any crypto, we’ll both get rewarded in Bitcoin as noted next to the link.
Gemini ($10 USD worth of Bitcoin)
Coinbase ($10 USD worth of Bitcoin)
Voyager ($25 USD worth of Bitcoin)
