News
Officially announced by Basic Attention Token on April 18th, 2018. Dow Jones Media Group publications include Barron's, MarketWatch, and more. It is part of Dow Jones, a unit of News Corp. Brave Software provides the free and open source Brave Browser built on Chromium.
Here I speculate, but the partnership may also be experimenting with the Brave Payments system. Below is a quote from the Brave Browser FAQ.
Brave Payments is itself powered by Private Internet Access®, Uphold, and the Basic Attention Token (BAT). According to basicattentiontoken.org BAT is "an ERC20 token built on top of Ethereum, [which] will be the token of utility in a new, decentralized, open source and efficient blockchain-based digital advertising platform". The Basic Attention Token and Brave Software are founded by Brendan Eich, the creater of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, and by Brian Bondy formerly of Khan Academy, Mozilla, and Evernote.
Background
Brave Browser intends to support, in addition to the default ad-free mode, an option to recieve "fewer, but higher quality ads". Trackers will still be blocked. Concerning use of the "Acceptable Ads" model, they will "use some of the filter rules that are associated with “Acceptable Ads” to block known-bad domains and URL patterns; and to block and clean up after HTML-native ads". They will not "use the business model of taking annual fees from advertisers to allow their ads (and trackers for confirmation) to pass unblocked". It is unclear to me what exactly their business model is, but it is known that Brave will take 5% of publisher contributions. Brave Software has previously partnered with CoinDesk in 2016 to "evaluate new revenue models with Brave that provide brand advertisers with significant returns on their investment while also providing users with a faster, cleaner, and more private experience".
So it now seems that moving forward Brave Browser will support two optional ways of supporting content producers: opt-in tailored but non-tracking ads, and anonymous blockchain-based micropayments. The opt-in ads use the browser's calculated user attention to reward publishers and participating users. The micropayments system can distribute donations to the selected publishers based on user attention, or instead be set specifically as the user desires. A diagram from basicattentiontoken.org below demonstrates how advertisers, users, and publishers each benefit from the BAT platform.
Original Input
This is everything I was able to glean from the press release and Brave Browser's FAQ. So other than the official news of the partnership, most of this is my attempt to sort through what services Brave Browser will actually be providing. I hope it was helpful. An better overview of the Basic Attention Token and the way it works can be found here. I have submitted this topic to the LTT forum in accordance with the guidelines because it is technology related news, has not to my knowledge been previously posted about, and may be of interest to the LTT / Floatplane community.
That is, I wonder what applications this technology will have with regards to Floatplane's advertising/business model? Please speculate and tell my why it will or will not apply below. This might just be technology for the Linus Media Group to consider, or perhaps it will compete as CoinDesk has previously reported that Brave Browser and its Payments system enable direct micropayments to Youtubers. I, for one, hope to see close integration with secure and anonymous transactions to support content creaters in the future, and BAT is looking like a great place to start.
Disclaimer: I am not affilliated with or invested in any of the companies, technologies, or products refered to in this post.
Sources
https://basicattentiontoken.org/dow-jones/
https://brave.com/dow-jones_1/ (same article as above)
https://brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/
https://brave.com/faq/#brave-payments
https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/
CoinDesk partnership press release (published 2016)
CoinDesk youtuber donations article (published 2017)
