Ad Free

By: Carolina Pérez

I’m pretty sure we have all been surfing the internet and all of a sudden an advertisement interrupts your navigation. When this happens it is annoying especially when you are watching a video or reading. A coworker of mine mentioned a token named Basic Attention Token (BAT) and with this token you can pay for the content you want to see.

Weird right? Paying for Ads?

When I began searching for information about this token and I learned that BAT is linked to a web browser named Brave. This browser was founded by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla. Brave’s browser runs faster than Chrome and Safari, saves users money in data charges and blocks ads and trackers.  Brave can be downloaded for free on the site.

According to Brave the average mobile browser user pays as much as $23 USD a month in data charges downloading ads and trackers. They also point out that popular sites often host many ads, going up to 70 trackers per site. This information was quite shocking to me and I believe most people don’t even realize how many ad pop-ups and different content is consuming your data while navigating.

I have never looked in to ad blocking apps, which is weird because I really dislike them. When I was doing research I came across this: “Over a period of one year, the global cost of ad blocking nearly doubled, adding up to more than 40 billion U.S. dollars in 2016”.

Aside from protecting yourself from this constant content, Brave is also creating a community by giving users the possibility to reward your favorite publishers by using BAT tokens. This token runs with the use of the Ethereum blockchain. Investopedia assures that“The token is used as currency on the Brave platform and can obtain several different advertising services. It is designed to be exchanged between users, advertisers, and publishers, and it is based on an unusual concept, although one that is critically important to advertising companies operating in the digital age: user attention”. I have also read that many content creators like YouTubers find this a very helpful initiative because most of the time, they don’t even get paid to create content. You can sign up in the Brave website to be a content creator and readers can choose to pay a monthly fee with BAT, money that is divided among the sites the user visits the most.

Basically, this browser gives users the option to see fewer ads and content based on what they want or none at all. The beauty of this new technology is that it gives options for people to decide on. According to the New York Times, “Ads are the lifeblood of the internet, the source of funding for just about everything you read, watch and hear online. The digital ad business is in many ways a miracle machine — it corrals and transforms latent attention into real money that pays for many truly useful inventions, from search to instant translation to video hosting to global mapping”. Although, this ad business at one time was revolutionary, it’s becoming a problem for users. Normally if we are interested in something we search for it ourselves. Nonetheless sometimes is great to find out about new things online that users would have probably never known its existence if it was not advertised, unfortunately we are flooded with them and that’s when it becomes annoying.

Hope you enjoyed it, comment if you like.

Originally posted on DavinciCodes.net