BAT Grows Publisher List to 8,000, Adds The Guardian As a Verified Publisher

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The success of Basic Attention Token (BAT) relies on a growing ecosystem of verified publishers the world over. In this article, we look at how BAT and Brave Browser is progressing along this journey, including a recent partnership with a major media site, and doubling up on their publishers thanks to a US$1 million bounty. Welcome to the future of online advertising!

ADsolutely Hate It!

What’s your number #1 gripe about visiting most websites? If you didn’t say “ads”, chances are you have an ad blocker doing the dirty work for you.

American economist Milton Friedman famously said, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, and in Internet Land, he was right twice over. Ads act like an online mafia, blockading the user experience with obnoxious retargeting efforts (woe is you if you searched for the word “tent”; now you’ll be bombarded with tent ads even if there’s 4-foot deep snow outside).

The Brave Browser

Brave, a company built by Mozilla co-founder and Javascript creator Brendan Eich, provides a solution to this problem.

Brave doesn’t load any ads or trackers whatsoever, promising:

• Faster load time (an average of 5 seconds faster on average)
• Safer browsing experience (by avoiding the unintentional download of malware, ransomware, and spyware via ads and trackers)
• Privacy (no trackers means actual privacy, not merely the search-history privacy offered by incognito tabs)
• Cheaper (as we’ll see below, it turns out your browser even ends up costing you money)

A study by the New York Times has revealed that due to the data costs incurred when loading ads, mobile carriers are essentially making more from ads than publishers are.

With an average of $23 a month spent on data charges to download ads and trackers, it’s clear that this is money wasted on things we don’t want to see anyway. By not loading ads and trackers at all, Brave bypasses this issue completely. This results in a load time that is 2 to 8 times faster than Chrome and Safari on mobile, and 2 times faster than Chrome on desktop.

Yet ADsolutely Necessary?

While the Brave browser is highly beneficial for consumers, it comes at a price for which publishers end up paying… or not getting paid, as the case may be. Display ads are what pay the bills for many websites, and the YouTube revenue model is built almost entirely on watching videos and paying with your, uhm, adtention. So while ads might be the bane of your online existence, they’re also a necessary evil.

Or are they?

Basic Attention Token

BAT is Brave’s revolutionary solution to the problem that many publishers need ad revenue to balance out their bottom line.

Basic Attention Token is a blockchain-based digital advertising system. A win–win system, it offers publishers the chance to get their ads in front of users by offering users ad revenue share for indulging their attention.

For an in-depth look at the premise behind BAT, read our article What is Basic Attention Token (BAT)?

BAT’s Growing Publisher List

BAT’s success relies on its ability to draw as many online content publishers as possible to sign on as publishing partners. BAT is “the new token for the digital advertising industry”, after all.

How are they faring in this quest?

Signing on a Prestigious Publisher

The Guardian, a grandfather publication established in 1882, is a formidable presence in online news reporting. It reaches a reported 152 million unique browsers worldwide.

Previously, The Guardian has been known to be sceptical of cryptocurrencies. Just recently, a contributing writer to the daily news site urged readers to steer clear of Bitcoin, even going as far as to state outright, “You should not invest in Bitcoin.”

So it was with great excitement that the BAT community discovered, a few weeks ago, that this very same publication had signed up as a verified publisher on the BAT platform.

The Community Responds to News About The Guardian

First reported on Reddit, the news was well-received.

This was the media I most waited for – to pay for. They don’t have a paywall, their [sic] non-profit and that makes them more independent.

-Reddit user juukione

Pretty juicy having a £250 mil a year media company on board!!

-Reddit user zercher_it

Maybe The Guardian will stop being so negative about crypto in general when they receive their first BAT pay check.

-Reddit user loofychan

This media company is huge and credible (as far as media goes). Brings a lot of street cred to the table.

-Reddit user bslick2u

And a comment by a user account that has since been deleted:

I don’t even care about the money at this point. I’m just excited to be a part of a paradigm shift in tech.

A US$1 Million Giveaway Doubles the Number of Publishers

Most recently, BAT managed to double their publication partners in just 7 days… with a little help from a whopping US$1 million worth of thank-you giveaways, that is.

Thanks to their User Growth Pool, created during their ICO back in May 2017, 300 million tokens were reserved to grow the Brave platform user base.

When they launched a million-dollar giveaway in January 2018, users stood the chance to receive promotional BAT tokens (worth an average of US$5). Users were unable to withdraw tokens and could, instead, only give them away to creators, and that within a period of 90 days. This created a great incentive for publishers to urge their users to sign up for and claim these tokens.

And boy, did it work! The number of Brave publishers doubled within a single week, rising from 4,000 up to 8,000 publishers. Of these, 6,000 publishers are YouTubers (with a grand total of 110 million subscribers, 20 of these with more than 1 million subscribers each), and 2,000 websites are now also on board.

Conclusion

A cryptocurrency like BAT works effortlessly to put quality back into online publishing, and it does so by empowering users to part with their attention consciously and willfully, deliberately rewarding publishers for their efforts. With a big media house like The Guardian on board, and an ecosystem growth of 100% in a single week due to the company’s ingenious User Growth Pool token allocation, these are important signals that blockchain, and BAT right alongside it, has the power to go mainstream when it solves a need.

And with Facebook announcing that its feed algorithm will change to focus predominantly on family and friends rather than ads, online content publishers have open arms to turn to in the form of Brave and BAT. And these arms pay, too!

Download the Brave Browser.