Oh shit, ladies and gentlemen, you're in for a big one today. Basic Attention Token. At this point with the various billion different articles and adverts regarding the Brave and BAT nowadays, this might be something that's a little bit worn out. It's like going to Thanksgiving Dinner and listening to your grandfather tell you the story about how him and grandma bought their first couch. You hear the story literally EVERY TIME you come over, and at this point you can practically mouth out and act out every single detail and event. Hell, you might as well have bought the couch yourself.

Despite all of this, I think that the fundamentals need to be hashed out in a way that's both semi-comprehensive and fun to read. After all, if you're a reader or author on this site, you're a beneficiary of the BAT ecosystem; you get tipped in it! In fact, based on my own numbers it makes up a good portion of the earnings we make here. In other words, there is some really cool shit that you need to know about BAT, and I'm gonna tell you. Because it's important. Oh yeah, you can read the whitepaper yourself RIGHT HERE.

Advertising Sucks The Big One

Don't you agree? Who wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what I wanna do? I wanna look at ads that tell me how many Asian singles are in my area". Not me. I know better. My small rural American town is whiter than a paper plate in a snowstorm. With a touch of Mexico. Every day, we are inundated with the most inane, stupid, worthless, retarded crap imaginable from ad agencies. Don't believe me? Take a look here; I went to a website I commonly go to read stuff; sciencealert.com:

Sponsored. Sponsored. Sponsored. What in Merlin's Ballsack does ANY of this have to do with science? I don't wanna see this "clickbaity" garbage. It makes me want to take a few extra Benadryl at night, just to get this cringey crap outta my head.

This is part of the problem. You see, in order for publishers to make any money on their... "publishing", they need to resort to taking up your time and... ATTENTION (this will be important to remember in a second) with this schlock. They're not targeted, they're ridiculous, and honestly, I will never click on them intentionally. Because they're bad. And they should feel bad.

Brave and Basic Attention Token is the solution to the problem, and this is how.

Streamlining The Attention Game

So, Brave took the ad game in a different direction, and like Matt Damon in The Martian, they Science'd the shit out of the advertising and attention game.

Step 1: Shit on Some Potatoes.

To summarize the beginning of the whitepaper, Advertising can be reduced to basically the economics of people's attention. For example, say you have a newspaper that has 10,000 monthly readers. That's a lot of people who is paying attention to what you're writing. Because you have attention (which is surprisingly a unit of economic exchange when you really get down to the nitty gritty) you can Sell that attention to other people who are wanting some of that sweet attention. So, they pay you for a piece of that newspaper. You get money. They get attention. Holy hell, a match made in Marketing Heaven. The same things occur with Radio, Television, and most recently the INTERNET!

But somehow, though the process of humans being messy and incredibly complex creatures, we went ahead and made the economy of attention into a hamfisted clusterfuck of a billion little middlemen between the advertiser and the publisher. The advertiser pays Agency A, which Pays Agency B to Pay Agency C to put an ad on the Publisher's content. And guess what happens? The above advertisements happen.

Through the process of everyone trying to get a piece of that Attention Pie, everyone is left with an increasingly smaller and smaller piece. Things get bloated, industry habits are reinforced, and you get to a point where even the attention loses its savor. Enter Banner Blindness. There have been serious minded studies that have demonstrated that people often do not give their attention to ads when they are perusing the web. Now, ad agencies have to get more and more creative and often more convoluted in order to maintain the attention that they so desperately want. Again, the above ads happen.

This is bad for everyone. Why? Because one, the publishers lose out on money in the end, the advertiser's campaigns are extremely inefficient, and most of all - the ads and trackers and other cool little bits and pieces of convoluted creativity that they came up with in order to maximize attention and learn more about their demographics end up costing the users MONEY. That's right, the cookies and data that they need to effectively run their ad stuff is directly costing YOU. According to the paper, it costs an additional 23 dollars per user because of data plans, costs, etc. Not only that, it also takes up TIME! In order for that bloated crap to load, it takes up bits and pieces of the loading time on websites.

Essentially, the current state of online advertising does this: It forces the user to pay in TIME and MONEY in order to make you look at ADS. In a roundabout way, the ad agencies are pushing a portion of advertising costs on the very people they want to see their ads.

You are paying to look at people's advertisements.

This system is to say the least, needlessly complex. A good equivalent would be taking an Olympic sized swimming pool, filling it to the brim with millions of sets of tangled Christmas lights, then hiring 85 year old women with arthritis to untangle them. What a Mess.

THE BASIC ATTENTION TOKEN

The first step was the most crucial: Introduce the BRAVE BROWSER. This browser has privacy and ad blocking technologies built into it that gives a Gigantic Middle Finger to every ad you can think of in the traditional space, so that they can put their ads to your attention instead.

What Brave then did is simultaneously simple and genius; They quantified attention. It's a ERC20 token based on Ethereum. As it turns out, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology lends itself perfectly to this use case, and with it they can make advertising clean, simple, and smooth. Instead of basically paying advertisers for your attention, advertisers are paying YOU. It works like this: Advertisers pay money for BAT, which they have in their ledgers for paying for ads. These ads are then shown to people all over the Brave Ecosystem and custom tailored to those people based on machine learning. They have nice little unobtrusive look at your habits, then send you an ad that meets those habits. Since I look up a lot of crypto related stuff, I get a lot of ads for things like Nexo, Energi, and other cool stuff. It's beautiful.

The BAT you earn can then be subsequently used on your favorite publishing platforms, the most common of which is Tipping. Yes, in much the same way you tip writers on Publish0x, you too can tip folks with the money made giving your attention to the advertisers. How are the ads shown? In little marginally unobtrusive notifications that are engineered to simultaneously get you to look at them and not be annoying pieces of shit. Again, SEE THE ABOVE ADS.

In turn, the publishers get their revenue, and sell the tokens on an exchange, which are then taken up by advertisers again, thus completing the circle of life. If that is not the coolest shit imaginable, I don't know what is. Here's a nice visual that goes over the basics:

It's the TRIFORCE of the Internet

The BOTTOM LINE

Brave and BAT are by far one of the most amazing and ambitious use cases in crypto that I have seen. Upon first glance, seeing that its objective is to take on the Kraken that is internet advertising might seem a little too ambitious. But then you look at the numbers. They are KILLING IT. At the time of this writing, they have over 10 million active users. That's a relatively paltry number compared to Chrome Browser, but they are growing. Can they grow? The business model dug down to the basics and dredged up some fundamental first principles of marketing. I think they can and will succeed over time.

But should I invest in it?

This isn't financial advice, but I think that it would a really solid investment, based on what they have accomplished so far, and what they intend to do in the future. BTW, Basic Attention Token is currently on a roll:

Nice. Along with an assortment of partnerships, inclusion in exchanges such as Coinbase, and a respectable trading volume, I think BAT can grow. They have a real solid model for inflows and outflows with their use case, a definite impetus for mass adoption and with a maximum supply of 1.5 billion tokens, I'd say the future looks good, especially if the Crypto market continue to follow the Stock to Flow trajectory. Which it is.

But don't take my word for it. I'm clothed today, but I could totally be naked right now while writing this. It would give me easy access to talk out of my ass. Do your own Due Diligence, and spend only that which you can afford to lose.

Thanks for reading, I REALLY really appreciate it. If you like this post, then please check out some of my others if you want.

AND if you want an easy way to earn a little extra crypto and help me out for FREE, please consider becoming my referral for the app FREE LITECOIN! They payout reliably every Tuesday. I have received several payments from them religiously and the offerwalls they have bring in some nice amounts too. Highly recommended.

Until next time, be careful. There's gonna be a bunch of BATs flying around.