by Brave
Problem: Digital advertising is broken. Too many middle men and funny business. Users and advertisers are both missing out.
Solution: is a decentralized, transparent digital ad exchange based on Blockchain. BAT is a transparent and efficien Blockchain-based marketplace for publishers, advertisers and users, accurately valuing and rewarding the durable user attention.
The first component is Brave, a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks third party ads and trackers. Brave uses a ledger system that measures user attention to reward publishers accordingly.
Brave will now introduce BAT (Basic Attention Token), a token for a decentralized ad exchange. It compensates the browser user for attention while protecting privacy.
We see BAT and associated technologies as a future part of web standards, solving the important problem of monetizing publisher content while protecting user privacy.
Users, publishers and advertisers stand to benefit from the implementation of BAT as a web standard. Increases privacy and performance for users, accuracy/reliability for advertisers and lowers fraud all around.
Attention has value, and is a commodity -- the promise of ad tech was/is to create a more effcient marketplace for attention.
The internet was suppose to price attention effectively; it does not.
ad-tech ecosystem that has evolved over the last 2 decades is a bewildering variety of middlemen and complexity
AIDA: Advertising, throughout history, has been used as the primary mechanism to capture Attention raise it to a level of Interest to incite some Desire that can then translate it into Action.
Attention is, in this sense, a form of scarcity, which raises fundamental economic questions... User attention is valuable, but it hasn’t been properly priced with an efficient and transparent market system.
Users choose ad blockers because malvertisements, load times, data costs, battery life, and privacy loss have real costs. Publisher suffer lower revenues and have difficulty targeting the remaining ad-viewing audience.
in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Human attention can be exhausted, until dopamine levels recover. Neurons can and do learn to ignore ad slots (so-called “banner blindness”).
Abuse of user attention and permanent loss of users, via ad-slot blindness and ad-blocker adoption, make attention different from substitutable commodities such as pork bellies or crude oil.
Brave (a web browser) is a new platform, and BAT (a token for decentralized ) is a new unit of exchange. Attention is measured as viewed for content and ads only in the browser’s active tab in real time.
In-device machine learning (ML) will match truly relevant ads to content from a level that middlemen with cookies and third party tracking are unable to achieve, regardless of how much of the user data is extracted and monitored from external models.
Browser-based tracking + ML will outperform current tracking. How?
These external models are still unable to track transactions well enough not to serve ads for products users have often already purchased.
So the browser will track purchase history to optimize ads?
By keeping the data on the device only, encrypting the data and shielding the identities of our users as a core principle, BAT forms a bond with users
Brave will keep data -- encrypted and anon -- on the device.
not only does their data hold value, it holds substantial value that has been ignored and exploited by the middlemen year after year in the current industry model.
Use n total view for at least n seconds, and calculate average over t time. For example, let n = 5, t=30d.
5 total views of advertising content in an active window, for at least 5 seconds each, on a 30-day average
Another suggested metric is the concave score[18]. This is a score which rewards a publisher for a thresholded and bounded function of the amount of time spent with the open and active page.
1ptfor2spageview,2ptfor30s, and3ptsfor60s(with diminishing or bounded returns for longer views.)
The Basic Attention Token (BAT), a token based on Ethereum, is an important element of a new marketplace. Ethereum is a distributed virtual machine that allows users to construct smart contracts for transactions.
Micropayments using BAT will be accomplished for the first stage deployment with the Brave Micropayments Ledger. Each viewed ad will be verified at the browser using the BAM.
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- up to 79% of mobile data transferred during visits to popular publishers was a result of ads
- Mobile advertising adds ~$23/month in data charges to average phone data plan while reducing battery life by 21%.
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600 million mobile devices and desktops (globally) employ ad blocking software
- Traditional publishers have lost ~66% of their revenue over the past decade, adjusted for inflation.
- 2016 ad fraud created by internet bots is ~$7.2 billion cost to advertisers (up from $6.3 billion in 2015)
- facebook and google Together have >73% of online digital ad revenue, and 99% (!!!) of all growth from 2015 to 2016 in US total online ad budget