Is Cryptocurrency The Future of Advertising?

Wouldn’t it be great if there were no ads bothering you while you surf the Web?

Or if your data is wasn’t everyone’s business? Companies use it to personalize your experience and bring you more relevant ads and content. Yet, most people are not comfortable with their data being a commodity and they also don’t see the results they are promised by giving up their data. As a result of recent data and privacy turmoil, people started taking their privacy online more seriously.

You get flooded with ads on a daily basis. You navigate through websites and services and you can see that the sidebars are full of ads. When you click on an ad – as if that ever happens on purpose – the website owner gets a portion of the funds.

The publisher wins, the middle man wins and the advertiser wins. But what about the user?

Recently, a new browser named Brave has been published with the intention to solve the advertising problem. It uses a Cryptocurrency named BAT, based on Ethereum which is trying to quantify the attention and the value of the user’s attention. A user can choose to reward their favorite content with this cryptocurrency. BAT would be the cryptocurrency for this.

The Brave browser is based on Chromium and has an ad blocker and other privacy related features. The user will be able to utilize this new Web browser to use the Web without having to see ads and be free of distractions. They will also be able to decide to see a BAT ad and get a reward in the form of cryptocurrency. With this crypto, they would be able to pay their favorite content providers for having great content.

“The browser still needs more people on in order to have the real potential in the long term, but it’s more than doable in the future,” says Sam Velinski, a regular contributor to Academized and State of writing.

The ultimate purpose of Brave is to be secure, safe and more comfortable for users. It will be a decentralised BAT trade platform which will work between advertisers, users and publishers in a much better way than it does now. There is also no need for the middle man taking a huge portion of the sum.

The coinbase earn website will reward the users with BAT tokens after they have watched some videos and downloaded the Brave browser. Coinbase earn is a platform that can be seen as an elaborate cryptocurrency advertisement.

Many people react with skepticism. The team behind this idea are the man who created Javascript and the Co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox. Both are great professionals and they can bring many new things with this idea, both BAT and Brave.

But the question remains is this the true future of digital advertising? It may sound a bit dystopian or different than what we have now but remember that Internet was different once as well. Google too.

“The main concern here is that BAT and Brave might take over completely, making it very hard on the users because we would be forced to listen and watch ads in order to use our beloved publishers and services,” says Amber Telling, an author at Australian help and Paper Fellows.

Imagine if it became a norm with email, cloud storage or YouTube. We would have to watch many of these ads in exchange for tokens that enable us to see our favorite content. Not to mention what that would do to publishers in the sense of traffic.

This is not a reality yet, but it might be in the future. In essence, it brings us many perks like having more privacy and paying for what we want to see with money we can earn from ads. But it also has some negative sides. Which one will prevail, we have yet to see.