I'm kicking myself for buying this coin without putting enough research into it. I just found this article about BAT and had to give my comments.
First of all, BAT is integrated with the Brave browser, which I'll admit is an excellent privacy-related browser. Instead of me butchering their explanation of how they work together, I'll just paste this from their website:
Explain the Brave and BAT products and how they work together.
BAT is a utility token for a new, blockchain-based digital advertising and services platform. Brave is a privacy-focused, secure web browser that blocks ads by default and provides surfing speeds up 7x faster than its competitors.
Brave currently runs an experimental automated and anonymous micro-donation system for publishers called Brave Payments. The BAT platform will absorb the Brave Payments ledger, which will migrate from Bitcoin micropayments to BAT microdonations in the near future.
The platform will further extend this work into advertising. Users have the choice of whether or not to opt-in to see ads, which use a separate open source component. When users opt-in to receive ads in the platform, ads will be privately matched to their interests and anonymously confirmed.
Publishers are rewarded accordingly with tokens. The user remains anonymous to all parties. Users who opt-in will also get a share of BATs and can use them on premium products, donate them back to publishers, etc.
The entire premise of their browser, token and advertising platform hinges on their expectation that users are going to OPT-IN to view ads. I think this is a huge flaw in their model and going to lead them absolutely nowhere.
Granted, I could be totally wrong, but I just don't see the same privacy-conscious people who use the Brave browser opting in to view ads under any circumstances. The program allegedly doesn't track their information and gathers data anonymously about them.
If their entire platform depends on people opting in to view ads and donating tokens to view content that they could probably view on other platforms for free, I don't see them going very far without making major adjustments.
Once again, I could be a complete idiot and totally wrong, but if I had a couple bucks to invest into a new coin, I wouldn't put it here. Regardless of the fact that the Brave browser is pretty good.
Still, as bad of an idea as I think it is, it seems that Brave is still managing to get some traction with both publishers and partners.
- In 2017, they managed to verify over 2500 publisher website, bringing the total to over 4000. Some of these are YouTube Creators as well.
- Over 1400 YouTube creators registered for the micro-donation program in BAT tokens
- They formed a partnership with DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused internet search platform
- Partnered with Uphold to facilitate payments
Read more about their 2017 accomplishments here.
Uphold describes itself vaguely as a "Membership Platform." After doing some digging on their site (which loads very slowly), it looks like they are a cross between Paypal and Shapeshift with some banking features added in.
This is a fairly interesting development.
All in all I can't say that BAT is very attractive from a technology standpoint. I think it's pretty stupid. But they've managed to convince some people who are much smarter than me that they should form a partnership.
So for that reason alone I'll keep my eye on it.