The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a cryptocurrency they designed to save advertising from itself.
Speculators are examining BAT because its builders target a growing business that can generate enormous amounts of money for publishers. Advertising is an enormous business that is growing.
Worldwide advertising media owners’ revenue grew from $621.19 billion in 2020 to $772.41 billion in 2021, Statista estimates. Statista projects, worldwide advertising media owners revenue will grow to $837.5 billion in 2022, $890.93 billion in 2023, $940.71 billion in 2024, $986.50 billion in 2025, $1.032 trillion in 2026, and $1.075 trillion in 2027.
Ad Fraud
Yet the advertising industry faces an enormous fraud problem. Fraud has always been a threat to advertisers.
For example, it has been common for newspapers to inflate their circulation numbers. Newspapers inflate circulation numbers because they base advertising rates on the number of subscribers. The higher the circulation, the more they can charge for advertising.
They work the same scam in digital advertising. For example, social media companies base ad rates on fake accounts that nobody reads or sees. Digital ad fraud is an enormous problem.
Digital ad fraud could cost advertisers $44 billion in 2022, Advertising and Media Insider projects. Frighteningly, fraudsters could take up to 45% of the money spent on digital advertising.
The amount lost to digital ad fraud could grow from $35 billion in 2018 to $100 billion in 2023, Statista estimates. American advertisers alone could lose $81 billion to fraudsters in 2022, Statista claims.
Digital ad fraud losses are high because such scams are hard to detect. In particular, advertisers have a hard determining if human eyeballs see their ads. One reason for this is that many social media users are bots or robots built for fraud.
For example, in 2017, Facebook (FB) claimed ads on its platform could reach 41 million Americans between 18 and 24, the Rand Organization alleges. That claim was false because there were only 31 million Americans in that age group, Rand alleges. Hence, Facebook based advertising rates on 10 million accounts.
How the Basic Attention Token fights Ad Fraud
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) fights ad fraud by verifying the existence of human viewers. To explain, they try to verify users’ existence by rewarding them with BAT.
BAT allows users to show that they are real humans with a Verified Creators Network. The Network rewards Creators with BAT. Subscribers, followers, and readers can tip creators with BAT or Brave Rewards. Major verified Creators include The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vice, Marketwatch, wikiHOw, Barron’s, and CoinDesk.
They claim advertisers have run over 7,500 campaigns on Brave. They claim those campaigns had a click-through rate (CTR) of 6%, and an average ad recall rate of 40%. The click-through rate is the number of surfers who click on an ad. BAT can verify the users’ reality through Brave.
BAT users use the Brave Browser, which rewards users with BAT. They pay users BAT when they surf the web with Brave. The hope is advertisers will pay more for verified users.
BAT’s enormous Ecosystem
BAT claims the Brave browser had 57.4 million monthly active users and 19.9 million daily active users on 29 November 2022.
In detail, they claim Brave supported 157,837 websites, 224,085 Twitter creators, 830,802 YouTube creators, 132,15 Reddit creators, 67,413, GitHub accounts, 134,363, Vimeo users, and 178,159 Twitch creators in October 2022.
They there were 1.7 million creators using BAT in October 2022. They claimed there were 10.6 million BAT wallets that supported 3.93 million onchain transactions on 29 November 2022.
Furthermore, they claimed over 400 advertisers were running over 2,300 BAT advertising campaigns in 188 countries on 27 October 2022. Major BAT advertisers include Verizon (VZ), Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Eneizer batteries, BLockFi, Nexo, Bitpay, Purple, and Upland. Publishers using BAT include The Guardian, National Public Radio (NPR), The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Vimeo, cheddar, and Khan Academy.
Crypto organizations using BAT include: Coinbase (COIN), Binance (BNB), Gemini, CoinDesk, FTX (FTT), BitGo, Crypto.com, Zebpay, and etoro.
They claim BAT will reward users with 70% of its revenue share.
What Value does the Basic Attention Token (BAT) offer?
I think the Basic Attention Token (BAT) offers true value because over 400 advertisers are using it. Notably, BAT was CoinMarketCap’s 18th most trending cryptocurrency on 27 November 2022.
BAT was CoinMarketCap’s 83rd ranked cryptocurrency with a $336.879 million Market Cap, a $337.890 million Fully Diluted Market Cap, and $15.011 million 24-Hour Market Volume on 29 November 2022. CoinMarketCap gave the Basic Attention Token a 23.53₵ Coin Price, a $14.899 million Centralized Exchange (CEX) Volume, and a Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Volume of $112,276.22 on 29 November 2022.
They base those numbers on a Circulating and Total Supply of 1.5 billion BAT.
In contrast, BAT was CoinGecko’s 95th ranked cryptocurrency with a 22.62₵ Coin Price on 29 November 2022. There was a $336.998 million Market Capitalization, a 24-Hour Trading volume of $14.294 million, and a Fully Diluted Market Cap of $339.141 million on 29 November 2022. They base those numbers on a 1.491 billion BAT Circulating Supply, and a Total Supply of 1.5 billion BAT.
I think the Basic Attention Token (BAT) is worth examining because BAT could make money outside the blockchain. Hence, the Basic Attention Token could survive a Crypto Winter.
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