What is Basic Attention Token (BAT)? – A Blockchain Platform that Pays for Viewing Ads

Basic Attention Token is a decentralized digital advertising exchange designed to provide a unique advertising experience to all the participants. Current digital advertising has proved to be very effective over the years as it provides advertisers with the opportunity to reach their target audience with a reasonable budget.

Further, it ensures that the users are displayed the ads that they’re truly interested in. But the problem with this advertising mechanism is that it’s managed by a centralized organization. These organizations have complete control over the user’s privacy and users can’t escape from it.

Similarly, advertisers need to pay a hefty share to these companies to reach their target audience. BAT aims to solve this problem with its decentralized digital advertising mechanism.

What is Basic Attention Token (BAT)?

BAT is a decentralized advertising exchange designed to provide equal benefits to creators, consumers, and advertising companies. BAT is usually referred to as “the attention economy” because it rewards the creators depending on the attention they capture and the users are paid for watching the ads.

Advertising agencies can also create accounts to promote different products and services. The users are required to download Brave browser to earn these rewards. The brave browser offers independent browsing by blocking third-party ads and trackers.

The users have the authority to choose whether they’re willing to watch ads or not. A user can watch up to five ads per hour. And they receive BAT tokens as a reward for watching these ads. Advertising companies can also benefit from this model because their ads are only displayed to the users who are actually interested in buying their products or services.

The users can easily withdraw their BAT tokens to their Uphold wallet within no time. They can also hold their tokens in the browser to take advantage of the price increase. Similarly, they can tip their favorite content creators to appreciate them.

BAT Brief History

The Brave browser was launched by Brendan Eich in January 2016. Brendan was also the creator of the famous web programming language, JavaScript. He was also a co-founder of Firefox. The team introduced a new payment system in September 2016 so that users can tip their favorite content creators.

The team raised around $35 million by selling 1 billion BAT tokens within 30 seconds during the initial coin offering in May 2017. The BAT team reserved 500 million BAT tokens for Brave Software’s growth. 300 million tokens out of these reserved tokens were held for future sale while the remaining 200 million tokens were held for the employees.

The Brave browser started offering a similar advertising model to Youtube in November 2017. The Brave browser became quite popular for its unique advertising model. It had more than one million active users by the end of December 2017.

And now it even receives 9.2 million active users on some days. On average, Brave user serves more than 24.5 million active users monthly.

Importance of Basic Attention Token (BAT)

A vast majority of internet users now prefer using their smartphones to view their desired content. Therefore, 98 percent of the websites have now become mobile-friendly. But traditional ad publishers haven’t yet considered it. As a result, a huge number of people lose plenty of internet data while trying to view some content.

Furthermore, some users get irritated when they see an ad on every website they visit. Some are not even interested in buying anything but they’re bound to view those ads because they don’t have an alternative.

But Brave browser has now appeared as an amazing alternative. It provides users with the ability to control ads. And it also incentivizes them for viewing the ads. The best part is that it respects users’ privacy.

The interesting thing about Brave browser is that it loads web pages 3-6 times faster than the competitors. And it’s possible because it blocks ads and third-party trackers by default.

How Does BAT Work?

BAT is an Ethereum-based blockchain network. It has its own internet browser (Brave) that enables users to watch ad-free content.

The advertisers are required to submit $2500 worth of BAT tokens if they’re willing to run an ad campaign. The network distributes this amount among content creators and consumers depending on their engagement.

The content creators receive rewards based on the number of views and impressions they get from the audience whereas the viewers are only paid for viewing ads. The interesting part is that the BAT network doesn’t share the users’ information with the advertisers.

The Brave account needs to be connected to Uphold for withdrawing the amount. The users are required to complete the KYC if they want to withdraw more than $1000 from the account.

Brave Micropayments Ledger

BAT network is also planning to introduce the Brave Micropayments Ledger which will connect advertisers to content creators. Thus, they will be able to run customized ads on different platforms while compensating the content creators.

Brave network will maintain anonymity during this interaction. And it will incorporate smart contracts for the secure transfer of payments.

Conclusion

BAT is a decentralized network designed to provide an ad-free browsing experience to users. It has a free internet browser that blocks ads by default. But the users can turn on the ads to earn some reward. The content creators are also rewarded for building engagement. BAT network provides a level-playing field for all stakeholders.

If you need more information about how the BAT network works, we’d be more than happy to help you.