Leveraging Brave’s Open Ecosystem to Monetize YouTube Videos, Blog Posts, and More

Brave has been striding onwards towards mainstream adoption, dominating the Android market in several geographies. But its native token, Basic Attention Token (BAT) hasn’t been able to find the same level of traction. Some independent content creators have found a new source of income with BAT tips as it can be used to monetize content, December 3, 2019.

A New, User-Focused Internet

At the heart of the privacy-enhancing browser, Brave is a vision to reclaim the glamour of the internet and restore power to the people. In an age of monopolies and crony capitalism, middlemen and corporations have multiplied their wealth while at the expense of the little guy.

Earning and spending BAT is its primary use case. It is a form of money that enables value transfer over multimedia layers, and users decide where value accrues. Content creators on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Reddit, and blogs can earn income through BAT tips.

In all honesty, this is still a fringe use case. There is almost no real adoption of BAT as a primary source of passing on value to content creators. Most of the fuss around BAT has been Brave using it to pay users for viewing advertisements. Branding and awareness drives can help propel the ecosystem from the current depths it sits in.

With Brave’s market penetration as a user-friendly browser with no shady data management practices, it opens up the BAT ecosystem to its target audience.

The Investment Mindset and Drawbacks of BAT

A key nuisance that stops BAT from being actively spent on money is the investment mindset that runs rampant in crypto. Even if a project launches a utility token, a large majority of the holders are in it to hold it and sell it as opposed to using it – which is what a utility token is for. The search for the next 10x altcoin has caused many utility tokens to falter since they aren’t designed to automatically appreciate.

A mindset like this means that nobody wants to spend their BAT as they worry about the money they would’ve lost if it rapidly appreciates next week. Volatility is a major bane on the space for a number of reasons.

The strongest drawback of earning BAT is the Uphold wallet. It isn’t all that “open” considering the wallet requires KYC for withdrawals. Earning BAT is open, but you cannot withdraw it unless you give your personal data to a wallet. Of course, Brave is required to comply with laws so they have no choice but to choose a provider that does this, however, removing this will encourage more people to partake in the system.