I’m Brendan Eich. I created JavaScript at Netscape, then founded the Mozilla project and Firefox. I’m now doing Brave as a new browser and a new system for properly valuing user attention.
Brave Software is introducing an innovative solution: blockchain based digital advertising.
Online advertising was once simpler. It consisted of advertisers, publishers, and users. Digital advertising has evolved into an opaque and inefficient marketplace publishers advertisers and users are all being harmed by this system. It’s hard to believe but we’re paying to be bothered by ads. Our mobile phone bill is going toward all the bandwidth spent on ads and trackers up to $23 a month, according to the New York Times.
Popular media sites we’ve seen as many as 70 trackers calling out, using your battery slowing down the 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 rising.
So we realized something needed to be done. We think the solution must involve a decentralized transparent digital Ad Exchange, based on the blockchain.
Brave is implementing this in stages, our first age is already in the brave browser which blocks ads and trackers, but also have a ledger system for rewarding sites based on user attention.
The second phase is where we try to move toward decentralized Ad Exchange, and that must involve a new kind of currency for user attention and that’s the basic attention token. The token is derived from, and therefore denominates, user Attention. Attention is really just focused mental engagement on advertisement on grade content. And whenever the user is looking at the browser can anonymously and privately monitor your attention as you view pages in tabs, and it can do this in a way that is highly accurate and highly private. We think this is essential to avoiding fraud and malvertising problems in the current ecosystem.
Publishers will receive tokens when ads are viewed. Users also get a share for their attention if they choose to receive ads. From that share, they can then donate back to publishers that they wish to support.
We also see publisher is being paid in tokens, 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.
BAT should become a new standard that’s used in the entire advertising ecosystem.
We believe that this combination of blockchain, smart contracts, browser analytics, accountable open source code and auditability, is the future of advertising on the internet.