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posted by chromas on Monday April 23 2018, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the webscale-blockchain dept.

The Brave browser's basic attention token (BAT) technology is designed to let advertisers pay publishers. Brave users also will get a cut if they sign up to see ads.

Brave developed the basic attention token (BAT) as an alternative to regular money for the payments that flow from advertiser to website publishers. Brave plans to use BAT more broadly, though, for example also sending a portion of advertising revenue to you if you're using Brave and letting you spend BAT for premium content like news articles that otherwise would be behind a subscription paywall.

Most of that is in the future, though. Today, Brave can send BAT to website publishers, YouTubers and Twitch videogame streamers, all of whom can convert that BAT into ordinary money once they're verified. You can buy BAT on your own, but Brave has given away millions of dollars' worth through a few promotions. The next phase of the plan, though, is just to automatically lavish BAT on anyone using Brave, so you won't have to fret that you missed a promotional giveaway.

"We're getting to the point where we're giving users BAT all the time. We don't think we'll run out. We think users should get it," CEO and former Firefox leader Brendan Eich said. "We're going to do it continually."

The BAT giveaway plan is an important new phase in Brave's effort to salvage what's good about advertising on the internet -- free access to useful or entertaining services like Facebook, Google search and YouTube -- without downsides like privacy invasion and the sorts of political manipulations that Facebook partner Cambridge Analytica tried to enable.


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  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday April 23 2018, @09:10PM (1 child)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Monday April 23 2018, @09:10PM (#670887)

    One of my extensions feeds google queries every so often to muddy google's idea of what I'm interested in. Methinks I could come up with an extension that went to select web pages every so often, collected my eyeball tax, and tossed everything else into /dev/null.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @02:14AM (#670987)

    Just add the proper user agent or cookies or whatever to wget -p -O /dev/null https://wherever.example/ [wherever.example] https://somewhere.else.invalid/ [somewhere.else.invalid]