Basic Attention Token is a utility that bridges the gap between the publisher, advertisers, and viewers. This token is Ethereum based and is used for advertising and attention based services. This also helps in replacing the traditional ads that keep annoying us on the website that we visit. Some important partnerships with famous online publishers were also announced yesterday. Let’s look into the use cases of this token and how it leverages blockchain technology.

Token for Blockchain Digital Advertising

Basic Attention Token (BAT) was created by Brendan Eich – the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox. He is also the creator of JavaScript. Google and Facebook make billion from Ad revenues, but the way of displaying ads in users’ browser is quite annoying for people, and they end up blocking the ads using ad blocker tools. This problem is solved in BAT by using the blockchain technology. BAT is just a token built on Ethereum blockchain that is a decentralized form of digital advertising.

BAT is the token that will be paid to the publisher automatically when the users pay “Attention” to the advertisement they publish. The token is built on decentralized blockchain so there is no third party to get the revenue and also there are no Google or Facebook ads that will be displayed on the page.

Brave is the browser used by BAT and users and publishers need to use this browser to get their share of revenue out of the Ads. The most challenging part of BAT is to convince the users to move from Chrome or Firefox to use “Brave browser“ to get paid. The Brave browser is privacy focused browser and has the ledger system to capture user attention. This attention is converted into BAT token and paid to the publisher.

How it Works

The Basic Attention Token blockchain concept is a little complex to understand, but it could be highly useful in replacing centralized platforms like Facebook and Google where they get large sums of revenue by annoying users with Ads they really don’t want to see.

BAT measures the Attention of the user when they view the ads and content in the browser’s active tab. The value is calculated based on the duration of time spent and the pixels in view. Users are rewarded with BATs. The publisher gets the majority of the revenue, and there is also an option for the users to donate tokens to the publisher.

The platform is free from fraud and Bots due to the use of cryptography and there is full transparency, mainly due to open source technology.

Major Partnership with Media Groups

There was a major announcement yesterday that just shook the cryptocurrency space. Major Media group Dow Jones announced a partnership with BAT. The Dow Jones Media group has teamed up with the Brave software team to get the benefits out of the digital advertising by using the BAT blockchain. The Dow Jones media group includes the legendary Barron’s,”Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch.

Daniel Bernard, Senior Vice President of Barron’s, said

“As global digital publishers, we believe it is important to continually explore new and emerging technologies that can be used to build quality customer experiences.”

Brave users will have premium access to the above journals. This is not the only major media group that has partnered with BAT. There are several other major media groups like Washington Post, the Guardian and Vice to name a few. All the above world famous news media companies are now verified publisher on Basic Attention platform.

The BAT Platform appears to have a very bright future, because it seems to have the potential to disrupt the current Social Media platforms like Facebook and Google by replacing the centralized ad revenue system with a decentralized blockchain based open source platform. This will benefit both the publisher and the users since both will receive the revenue in the form of BAT tokens, instead of the current system where huge sums of revenue go to only multi-Billion dollar companies like Facebook and Google.

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