Launched by Brendan Eich, JavaScript creator, co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, Brave browser is introducing a new solution called Blockchain (Bitcoin Technology)-based digital advertising.
What is Brave Browser?
Brave browser is a new browser and a new system for properly valuing user attention that uses blockchain (Bitcoin Technology)-based digital advertising.
Problems with Online Advertising
According to Eich, online advertising used to be simpler. It consisted of: advertisers, publishers and users. Today, digital advertising has evolved into an opaque and inefficient marketplace. Publishers, advertisers, and users are all being harmed by this system.
Eich points out the average mobile phone bill is going towards all of the bandwidth spent on ads and trackers – up to $23/month, according to the NY Times. Additionally, popular media sites have as many as 70 trackers calling out, using your battery, using up bandwidth and slowing your page load, increasing your data costs.
Users are now trying to protect themselves with ad blocking. It’s on over 600 million phones and desktops, and it’s rising.
The solution? Blockchain (Bitcoin Technology)-based digital advertising.
Eich and his team realized something needed to be done, and their solution involved a decentralized transparent, digital ad exchange based on the blockchain (Bitcoin Technology).
Brave is implanting this in stages.
STAGE 1 – Block Ad Trackers – Reward Sites for User Attention
The first stage is already in the Brave browser, which blocks ads and trackers but also has a ledger system for rewarding sites based on user attention.
STAGE 2 – Decentralized Ad Exchange
The second phase attempts to move towards a decentralized ad exchange, which involves a new kind of currency for user attention: the Basic Attention Token.
The token is derived from and therefore denominates user attention. Attention is defined, in this sense, as focused mental engagement – on an advertisement – on great content – on whatever the user is looking at.
The browser can anonymously and privately monitor your attention as you view the pages in tabs, and it can do this in a way that is highly accurate and highly private. Eich thinks this is essential to avoiding fraud and “malvertising” problems.
Publishers will be notified when ads are viewed. Users will also get a share for their attention if they choose to receive ads. From that share, they can then donate back to publishers they wish to support. They also see publishers, paid in tokens, be able to use those tokens to reward users to promote their content. And if they like, they can charge for premium content that is paid in tokens.
A New Standard for Valuing User Attention
According to Eich, blockchain (Bitcoin Technology)-based digital advertising should become a new standard that is used. He believes that this combination of blockchain(Bitcoin Technology), smart contract, browser analytics and accountable, open source code and audit ability is the future of advertising on the Internet.
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