Brendan Eich’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) aims to provide a much needed solution to the current state of digital advertising, and the team has recently made headlines again with their attempt to win over content creators on YouTube.While we often think of issues within the online advertising industry as specifically pertaining to websites and web publishers, content creators across all multimedia formats are facing a similar struggle. When a multimedia creator wants to start earning revenue online, they often begin by integrating advertisements into their product. Much in the same way a website’s publisher may decide they want their page to contain ads, creators on YouTube are given the option to integrate advertisements on the videos they upload in exchange for a portion of the revenue. The issue with this system is that content creators have much less control over their revenue stream, as intermediaries control how advertisements are distributed. Additionally, since users often use ad-block software, this further reduces a creator’s revenue from their content.
The Basic Attention Token team have identified another way in which their project could help to shift the power dynamic of online advertising. As of BAT’s new update, YouTube creators are able to register as individual publishers with the token’s supplementary browser, Brave. Once a creator signs up for free as a publisher, their fans able to support them directly based on time they spend watching their content, or through donations made with Basic Attention Tokens.
!!! p2p viewer->creator payments for youtube videos. No ads, no middlemen, no censorship. Wow.
gg Patreon. https://t.co/lyR2z438Up— Jordan Leigh (@AlwaysBCoding) November 16, 2017
In providing this revenue stream, the Basic Attention Token are once again competing with Google. The hope is to win the support of YouTubers who are unhappy with the platform’s tendency to demonetize videos that they decide have strayed from the site’s content guidelines. On November 15th of 2017, the BAT team elaborated by stating: “The Brave browser provides an ad-free YouTube video experience. It also enables a direct monetary relationship between the content creator and their audience. Compensation for YouTube creators no longer needs to be based on vague rules or mercurial algorithms, as users can decide who to compensate.”
While Basic Attention’s Token’s new system seems theoretically ideal for content creators, putting it into action will require earning support from big-name YouTube creators. The BAT team’s community managers have launched a Reddit campaign to reach out to creators that are vocal in their criticism of the current YouTube ad revenue system, in hopes of persuading them to become Brave publishers and promote the new platform to their audience. If the team is successful in reaching out to large content creators, it could have an extremely positive effect on BAT’s popularity, and help continue the project’s exponential growth.Image credit: Basic Attention Token
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