Are you reading this on the Brave browser? If not, soon, you might be! Brendan Eich, creator of the Brave browser and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) recently hinted at a major content publishing website that is in talks to adopt BAT usage and payments! This was announced on a well-known cryptocurrency-related podcast called What Bitcoin Did. You can sign up for the Brave browser here and you’ll get $5.00 in free Bat!
The Brave Browser is designed to block advertisements and trackers, while simultaneously providing a platform for direct advertising and payment to users. Brave browser also hopes to be a source of direct funding for content creators from users and advertisers via BAT.
This latest announcement by Eich also reiterated two potential revenue streams using BAT: both from ad revenue and from “a lightweight, low-friction, user-pays model”. Essentially, the second is micropayments for individual content instead of paying for general access. This would allow specific payment for content that wants to be viewed, as opposed to paying too much for content that will never be watched.
This type of ad revenue, micropayments, constitute a “found-money effect”, a revenue source that was not previously possible or viable with fiat money. On this partnership, Eich hinted:
“I’m going to tell a story about a site, and you can guess which it is. It has 80 million adblocking unique vistors per month – it has many more non-adblocking, but it’s a high adblocking incidence. And they are ready to try something with us that would convert those adblocker users to Brave”.
Eich reiterated that such adblocking demographics represent huge opportunities for both the Brave platform as well as publishing entities entering the system. Those publishing entities could benefit directly and immediately from the BAT payments from users.
The BAT would be from users, who are granted the BAT just for using Brave. It’s essentially a continued airdrop that will undoubtedly prime the system. The granted BAT can only be used to fund creators – it cannot be sold, it cannot be transferred, and the funds expire within 90 days if not used, incentivizing users to use it for content.
The airdropped BAT are only a temporary measure – a stopgap before the full ad system is implemented. Brave Browser will eventually pay uses for watching ads, with advertisers paying users directly for their time.
But who’s the partner with nearly 80 million ad-blocking visitors to their website? Well. Eich gave us a huge hint – 80 million ad-blocking visitors. According to Statista, a well-known and used web traffic statistics aggregator, 27% of global users use adblocking software. So with 80 million adblocking users, the website should have about 300 million total unique monthly visitors.
Looking at websites that publish content, WordPress has 327 million visitors per month. Pinterest has 303 million. Quora, Reddit, XHamster and IMDB have 270, 245, 241, 233 million respectively.
Of those websites, WordPress, Pinterest, nor Quora are currently registered under the BAT system. But WordPress is cryptofriendly, having registered itself as a Civic Secure Identity Platform using the CVC token. Conveniently enough, CVC is a partner of the Brave Browser for identity and know-your-customer (KYC) services.
Eich ended the interview by saying that 23,000 entities are signed up to receive BAT payments through the Brave platform. Dow Jones Media Group, the Guardian, and the Washington Post newspapers are already onboard with the platform. With about 90,000 users supplementing their BAT wallets with outside BAT, there are about 413,000 wallets funded and ready to start paying for content.
We’ve covered BAT and the Brave Browser before. You can sign up for the Brave Browser here. BAT was also one of our signals! BAT has had a good month – just a few days ago, it launched on Coinbase and the price skyrocketed. Do you think the Brave Browser and BAT will be successful? Let us know what you think on our Facebook page!
