A new dimension in advertising
Visitors as well as maintainers of websites currently face a fundamental problem: how can the service be financed without overloading users with ads and tracking? Ads can slow down the site dramatically as well drain your device’s battery. Tracking is more or less mandatory if you want to maintain your service’s running costs. But can’t there be an alternative? What if the system of advertising was decoupled from integrating it directly on the site, for example as large and heavy promotion trailers, and instead handled by another program?
Exactly this concept has been in use for quite some time now by the “Brave” browser. If you download the browser, you can opt-in to get notifications containing advertisements. The frequency of these notifications is quite relaxed and their presence doesn’t disturb at all. And as mentioned - this system is optional and has to be acknowledged by the user first.
But what is “BAT” now?
BAT is an acronym for “Basic Attention Token” and it’s the whole system that powers this idea:
- users earn BAT-units for allowing and seeing the displayed ads
- website owners can register as providers in the BAT-system and only then user’s can receive promotion notification when they’re visiting the site
- At the end of the month, the collected units by the user get distributed to the registered content creators, relative to how much time has been spend on the respective sites
- finally the creators can exchange the received units for money
Closing the loop
This whole setup gets enabled by advertisers that actively pay for their content being promoted in the BAT-system. “Basic Attention Tokens” themselves are stored in the blockchain and use an implementation based on “Ethereum”. Creators such as website owner don’t have control over what’s shown in the advertisement, as it’s the case for the currently used ads on websites.
Interesting side note: this web app is also enrolled in the BAT-system by Brave. So if you visit flaming.codes in a Brave-browser, chances are a notification will pop up from time to time containing an unobtrusive ad.
Thanks for the looking by!
Tom
