Basic Attention Token (BAT) and the Brave Browser Roadmap

What is BAT?

Basic Attention Token is a form of crypto currency that is aiming to provide a better way to reward users for their attention, publishers for their content and provide a better solution to see a return on investment for Advertisers. Attention at it's simplest level is how long the advertisement is in the active and main tab of the Brave browser and uses the count of pixels in view in relation to the main content of the ad. So if you just have the top portion of an ad in sight and it isn't the main proponent of the ad, then the focus is smaller compared to having the entirety of the ad on screen.

The Brave Browser - what ties it all together

As we all know our browsers are flooded with trackers, ads and other ways to try to get clicks out of viewers to the site. While the premise of expecting a user to click on an advertisement in page MAY have worked early to mid 2000's that ship has sailed for many today. Ads are often targeted with tracking cookies today by monitoring a users behavior but still provide no benefit to end users. Actually to the harm of users, some ads on sites could be malicious leading to sites through third party content providers.

The Brave browser blocks trackers with a no exception rule. The browser also blocks malvertisements by eliminating those third party hosters of content for ads. Another really cool aspect of Brave is something called the Basic Attention Metric (BAM). This is the only accepted and standardized way in Brave to get data on the attention for ads displayed from users. The reason this is the standard is that trackers in ads on our browsers today could use a plethora of tracking metrics which could inherently be very insecure.

The two best parts of all this for you:

1. YOU get BAT tokens for your attention even if you don't directly click or engage ads.
2. Your identity remains anonymous through all of this, Brave uses the Anonize Platform to keep your info secure so you don't have to worry about a breach of a company leaking info they could have gleaned from your browsing.

The Roadmap and last thoughts

The ICO for BAT ended May 31st, 2017 and during that time it attracted a lot of attention upon itself. One of the things that a lot of ICO's don't have off the bat (no pun intended) is a deliverable product such as the Brave browser. And the fact that the leading force to the project was the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox (Brendan Eich) definitely helped draw eyes to it as well.

A roadmap was released on the 16th of June this year to outline goals of the project. As I mentioned Brave is out now but to be expected it isn't fully realized yet. You can check out the roadmap here to get a full view of all the goals it aims to hit but I wanted to touch on a few in the first phase that are projected to be met by summer of 2017 which we are currently in:

1. Integrating the BAT wallet into Brave.
2. The development of the machine learning aspects to present ads in user slots based on your search queries (the cool thing about this is that a company like Google doesn't own your search history, you own it).
3. Begin using BAM to measure ad engagement.

Summing it all up

If I could define what Brave and BAT aim to do in one sentence I think it would be as follows - it rewards your time while putting you more in control of your data. I recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it. You can download the browser now and try it out but keep in mind it is still in an early phase of development.

Thanks for reading and all your comments, upvotes and follows! If you have any experience with BAT or Brave put it in the comments, I would love to hear about it!

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