Every time we open a webpage, more often, we encounter annoying advertisements that indeed get into our nerves. No matter how much we want the page to load immediately, the adverts that keep popping up come into the scene to interrupt.
Ads have now become a natural thing since it has become one of the most used marketing strategies in the business world and the bread and butter of many people around the globe. Even ad blockers sometimes fail to prevent advertisements from showing up.
Internet users often think that ads only interfere with their browsing experience, but it actually does more than that— it costs you money. According to statistics, 3rd party ads and trackers consume about 50% of mobile data since advertisements loads first before the content or actual web page. It also consumes about 20% of a mobile’s battery life.
The world of digital advertising is broken, and Brave has come up with a new, blockchain-based way to fix it. The solution they come up with is the Brave Web Browser.
What is Brave Web Browser?
Let’s relish some minutes to talk about the problems in today’s digital landscape before diving deep into how Brave browser and BAT works in delivering a better internet.
Surely, in this digital era, you go online every day for various reasons. Perhaps, for online shopping, read an article, listen to a podcast, watch a video, sell services and products, or communicate with far family, friends, and colleagues.
Whenever you navigate the internet to consume content, the server gathers and delivers that content to your personal computer. However, the servers also need to gather and deliver adverts from advertising exchanges too. This wastes precious time since ads take time to load, and of course, like what was mentioned earlier, ads cost money.
While users may not be fully aware of it, alongside advertisements that run on websites are the chances of bumping into malicious advertisements, called malvertisements. This permits the hackers to acquire access to sensitive information stored on your personal computer, including your name, social security number, date of birth, and debit/credit card number. Some of these malvertisements don’t even require you to click for them to gain access to your information.
To put it simply, today’s famous browsers come with a cost: cost of privacy, cost of safety, cost of time, and ultimately cost your hard-earned money. There are numerous issues with the current model of browsers, which can be harmful to both users, advertisers, and publishers.
This is where the Brave browser comes to steal the scene.
To address the ads problem that was mentioned latterly, Javascript creator and Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich and former employee of Mozilla Brian Bondy developed the Brave browser.
Free and open-source, the Brave web browser provides users with a safer, more private, faster, and more equitable internet browsing experience. It is a privacy-first browser and a blockchain-based digital advertising platform that reconstructs how publishers and advertisers utilize the internet.
The Brave browser was built through open-source software, Chromium, which also powers Google Chrome, making unfamiliarity not a problem and allowing you to use all your favorite extensions and plug-ins to work seamlessly.
Let’s talk about the benefits that the brave browser can give you one by one.
Privacy-first Browser
As a baseline, the Brave browser blocks malvertisements, regular ads, and trackers to ensure a safe browsing experience while delivering it for free. It has built-in ad blockers and other features that keep the user’s information private.
Brave is three times faster than other browsers because the ad blocker refuses to accept the request to other domains and resources that users don’t need.
Blockchain Advertising
Online content publishers make big revenue from adverts, and the advertisers receive value for the money they spend on ads. However, these ads aren’t too upsetting and do not follow users 24/7 in the Brave browser.
As a matter of fact, users of Brave browser won’t see any YouTube ads even while playing YouTube videos. Yet, creators still make money since they are signed up for the creator program and have claimed their accounts.
Brave users have the authority over the number of ads they want to see, from 10 ads per hour all the way down to no ads at all.
What is BAT?
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is the native utility token of the Brave web browser, which is basically just an Ethereum token. The purpose of BAT is to present a solution to digital advertising through a blockchain model.
Today’s digital advertising collects data, packs it up, and sells it to the highest bidder— Google and Facebook are widely recognized for this since they have the means to track their users.
For instance, you visited a particular website, and then when you open your Facebook newsfeed, you see advertisements about or related to the website you visited. The Facebook Pixel, an application programming interface (API) installed on that website to store your data for advertising purposes, is responsible for this.
Although such marketing undertakings are helpful to brands to sell their products, it is a grave privacy invasion. Even the United States Senate has been throwing Facebook with sanctions regarding the issue.
On the other hand, Basic Attention Token (BAT) developers provide a user-focused approach to advertising. Rather than sending the users to some centralized server, they measure the browser itself by tracking the user’s attention and engagement on active tabs in real-time. This gives the browser an idea of which ad to show, depending on the time consumed on particular content.
Technically, BAT is a token that advertisers pay to get attention.
How Does Basic Attention Token (BAT) Work?
BAT works arm in arm with Ethereum blockchain and Brave Web Browser to oversee transactions between readers, advertisers, and content creators. There are a variety of reasons why this token brings these entities together.
Whenever a content creator publishes on a website or posts a YouTube video, the advertiser offers a specific number of tokens for ad space on that content, after which they will come into an agreement according to the attention score gained by measuring the engagement of the user.
Basically, this only means that ads are more tailored for users’ benefits while giving advertisers the best out of their bucks. Not only that this model ensures that user will see well-tailored ads, but it also improves the privacy, speed, and security of the browser.
Users can actually completely get rid of advertisements but allowing a few can help in earning BAT tokens through the Brave rewards program. In layman’s terms, if you choose to view ads, you will earn tokens. Some Brave users earn $100 every month just by doing what they usually do in other web browsers.
Using the Brave browser is a win-win situation for both users and advertisers since users only see ads that they fancy while getting paid for it, while advertisers only show ads to interested customers. Advertisers also save costs since they only get billed when interested users click on their ads.
With Brave, users don’t get interrupted and bugged with irrelevant ads, third-party trackers, or malware.
Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) Tokenomics
What makes Brave web browser standout among other browsers is its blockchain technology which ensures that advertisers, users, and publishers do not have the need to rely on external servers.
The BAT project was first launched in 2017 through an initial coin offering (ICO) where 1 ETH could buy users 6,400 BATs. About $200 million of the funds was allocated for the development of the project, $300 million went to the user-growth pool.
At the time of writing, BAT trades at $1.30 and has a market cap of more than $1 billion.
