How to destroy Facebook and Google’s advertising monopoly

An inside look into one of blockchain’s most promising projects

#DeleteFacebook and #HelloBrave

The advertising industry is broken

Over the past few years, digital advertising has been overrun by middlemen, fraud, and trackers. Users are abused, privacy violated, big platforms like Google and Facebook take more than 73 percent of all the ad dollars while publishers and advertisers are not allowed to monetise their services.

For instance, Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm in the UK harvested the personal data of people from over 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that will help them target voters and send a personal political advertisement to them based on their geography and characteristics.

Employees of Cambridge Analytica were even caught on camera boasting of using fake news and dirty tricks to swing election results around the world. An investigation by British data watchdog and a key investigation firm in the United States showed that Facebook also violated the privacy agreement of most of its users and made millions of dollars using the private information of users on the platform.

Can someone save it?

A smart solution has been put in place by Brendan Eich, an American technologist and creator of the JavaScript programming language and Mozilla Firefox browser. It’s called Brave.

Brendan recently founded the Brave browser which is an open source and privacy focused browser that blocks malware advertisement and trackers and also uses a system that captures user’s agreement to reward the publisher.

The Brave browser is the central piece of the BAT project

The brave browser works hand in hand with the Basic Attention Token (BAT), which is a unique crypto-token that has been created to improve the efficiency of digital advertising.

Users get paid in BATs for watching adverts or attention based services, whilst advertisers and publishers get rewarded in BATs for producing high quality content. A win-win for all parties involved.

The token is being traded on a decentralised and transparent digital ad exchange that is based on the Ethereum blockchain network. The utility of the token is solely based on the user’s engagement.

How does the magic work?

The Brave browser works by monitoring user’s attention, making it a perfect tool in calculating the publisher’s reward with BATs. By using this browser, publishers now receive more revenue because intermediaries (e.g. Facebook, Google) and fraud are radically reduced. Moreover, users receive fewer but better ads that are less prone to malware while advertisers get better data on their spending.

One unique feature of this platform is that users are not forced to see the ads. Instead, they are giving the opportunity to choose what kind of ads they will like to view while the publishers automatically generate well deserved revenue.

This system totally eradicates the role of middlemen like Google Ads, Facebook Ads and others who take a share of the advertising revenue, giving publishers the lion’s share which they truly deserve.

Should I be investing in BAT?

Investing in BATs is akin to investing in a project or technology you strongly believe in. If you believe in electric cars, you want to invest in and support Tesla, the same applies to the BAT if you believe that the online advertising industry needs to be revamped.

Blockchain projects such as BAT are changing the investment landscape. Our job at Donut is to help navigate this evolving landscape. Having a small exposure to crypto tokens like BAT, if balanced by equities and bonds, can help increase the expected return in investment portfolios significantly whilst maintaining low levels of risk.

Deciding the suitable allocations is what we specialise in, so you don’t have to do any of the hard work.

Our mission at Donut is simple. We want to help you curate a personalised investment portfolios of crypto assets and traditional equities in under 5 minutes. Have a play with our simulator tool to see how easy the process can be.

With love ❤️,

Neel & Jordan

Team Donut

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NB: This article contains views that are solely Donut’s and should not be in any way treated as investment advice.

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