Why do I use Brave browser?
For security, privacy, efficiency and also because of the fact that users can earn a crypto currency token. The value of BAT is at around 20 cents in the current market value but there are multiple articles published in various platforms in the last two years that suggest the potential breaking off of this token in the near future. And, there are many who doubt it.
I understand what the Brave browser and Basic Attention Token (BAT) as a system is trying to do. The system wants to disrupt the ad revenue distribution model and put publishers on the forefront. On doing so, they are also rewarding users for their valuable “attention” they give to publications and posts. That’s why the token is named Basic “Attention” Token.
So, I was curious to understand how the system calculates your attention and distributes the rewards in token.
This is the most searched question on google and Quora, it seems. I tried to do my research to understand if it is possible to earn bags full of BAT by just browsing the internet. There are articles claiming they earned 50 USD equivalent to BAT every month. Well, it was not true in my case.
For the month of July I earned 3.690 BAT (0.93 USD) on my mac and on my Android Brave browser the total estimated earning was recorded as 12.8 BAT (3.23 USD). I use Brave browser on my Mac roughly 4 times higher than I use it on my phone. It is interesting to see the difference in estimated earnings and that begs the question “why”.
How do they decide how much to pay to users?
As I said before the rewards are distributed on the basis of your attention. But I am not sure whether the attention is on the independent ads the browser sends to users or is it the overall time you spend on the browser itself.
I even dug out their white-paper to better understand what are the metrics they use to calculate that. In their own words
Users receive 70% of the revenue share in BAT, which can be contributed to content creators or redeemed through Brave Rewards.
“The idea here is that the advertiser sends a payment in token along with ads to users in a locked state Xa. As the users view the ads, the flow of payments unlocks, keeping part of the payment for their own wallet (Xu), and passing on shares of the payment to Brave (Xb) and passing the remainder on to the Publisher (Xa-Xu-Xb).”
In this model, as reported here, out of the total revenue collected users could receive 15% [for publisher ads] or 70% [for users ads] to their Brave wallet. The rest of the 15% will be then shared between the advertisers, the publishers and Brave.
All this to say, there is no clear answer in plain language to know how exactly the system distributes rewards to each user. The white paper suggests various metrics to calculating users’ attention but does not provide a concrete section on which metric they will use. The FAQs section simply puts it as “Brave’s anonymous-but-accountable attribution model confirms event activity, without exposing or identifying the user.”
Does this mean I will not use Brave Browser?
No. I will keep using the browser as I think it is good irrespective of that added potential advantage of earning rewards. However, it would be comforting to know how they are planning to mobilize their 17 million monthly active users in promoting the use and adoption of BAT.
Let me provide you my Brave referral link if you have not already done so.
https://brave.com/ram586
Here are links to my social media platforms if you have extra BAT that are ready to be tipped.
https://twitter.com/raamesa
https://www.reddit.com/user/raamesa
