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Basic attention token, or BAT, has been one of my favorite cryptos for a long time. The general idea behind BAT, is that users give away their data constantly… But are never seeing the value of the data they offer to the world. To bring that information to users, the company created the BAT.
The way it works in practice is quite simple. First, the user downloads the app and is guided through the install/privacy settings. The installation process takes a few seconds but gives the user some brief details confirming that their privacy is protected, and asks them to use the browser as their default browser. Finally, the end process confirms that your brave attention token wallet is live.
After that point, using the brave browser is a lot like using any other chromium-based browser. Most of the features are built-in and easily accessible.
So if the brave attention browser is this cool and this important, what are the main things holding it back?
1) The biggest problem with BAT token in 2022
Right now if you were to ask a random person on the street how much their privacy is worth to bigger companies, they probably wouldn’t have the slightest clue.
That’s a problem in my opinion. We are experiencing the biggest gold rush in the information age and most of us hold our own supply. But at the same time, we are giving out our supply to companies that are high in demand but know we undervalue our data.
Brave and the early adopters understand this concept but most people don’t. Building out the brave token means building out a brand of customers that appreciate their own data’s worth.
In the future, I highly recommend the people at Brave take a look at psychology to determine ways they can encourage their users to be more data-focused and privacy evaluative.
2) Basic Attention Token Acknowledges that Users Pay More Attention To Privacy
One of the things I like the most about the way that the BAT token is named is the fact that it focuses on your attention as a valuable property. For too many privacy-focused users like myself, the evaluation of a price for attention is indescribable.
However, for most laid-back users, one thing I don’t think many people understand is that their attention is not their own. Your attention is constantly being shifted and focused by factors outside of your despite however much control we think that we have.
For example, let’s say when what percentage of your attention would you argue is owned by you in that moment? I think the average user would argue that their attention is between 80 and 90% on the road at most times however I would argue that most people’s attention is somewhere between 20 and 30% on the road at all times.
With music playing and advertisements and conversations happening within the car and podcasts … Most of your attention after a certain comfortability with driving in general.. is focused on keeping your mind moving rather than keeping your mind focused on the job at hand.
Is your Attention Worth Your Crypto?
Marketing professionals understand this very very well. They understand that your belief that your attention is completely owned by you, is the reason why marketing is successful. As long as you believe that every aspect of your attention is completely your own, marketing professionals can constantly divert your attention away from what you’re trying to focus on.
When you’re driving, when you’re scrolling through social media, when you’re listening to a podcast, or when you’re listening to music, everything about what you do in your day today is influenced and managed by a brand or a marketing professional. Marketers understand that the value of what they bring to the table is in diverting user attention, not in the marketing materials they provide.
So how does that fact factor into the basic attention token? Quite simply marketers are not the biggest fans of privacy concerns or ads that are focused on delivering specific information to an attempted user. In fact, the best user that most marketing professionals can hope for is Young and unable to control the areas and where their attention shifts.
That’s because the user who clicks on ads that are immediately enticing and follows all of the easily guided steps to creating a purchase decision, is the person who makes marketing campaigns successful. Google has known this for years and is constantly creating a marketing machine that makes it subliminally easier to make purchasing decisions without properly vetting the source. In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a constant shift in the way that Google allows marketing agencies to make their ads a little bit easier to digest while online.
And if you think for even a brief second that you’re not that user that has their attention constantly shifted and diverted.. chances are you’re completely wrong. I’d be willing to say that 99% of users who have any sort of connection to the internet are the users that I’ve described today because here’s the catch … It’s very very difficult to be the user that isn’t influenced by advertisements.
3) BAT suffers from Lower Browser Platform Exclusive Loyalty.
Especially in the US, we tend to choose sides and stick to them. Android versus apple, Democrat versus republican, Christians versus atheists, dog people, cat people, almost everything about the way we operate has been reduced to one or the other choice. The people at Brave know they have to combat this.
Reducing platform exclusively could like like having an extension on the chrome browser that helps create value on their existing browser. Without making massive switches, people could be more informed about the way their data is used and how valuable it is.
The problem is, especially in the USA, we don’t know how valuable our database away data daily in ways we can’t even comprehend. Part of the importance of knowing how valuable our data is starts by seeing how it’s used. Brave might be able to help more people realize that. e to help more people realize that.
4) BAT Can’t Grow without Massive Growing Pains in the Technology Transfer
The advertising on the brave browser seems simple enough. Install the browser, and switch it to your primary, profit. But it’s really more complicated than that.
Migrating browsers for most users should mean switching browsers where passwords for a million websites is stored, changing all your settings, migrating all your extensions, adding work profiles, etc.
No browser is great at this and the brave browser is not an exception. Plus there’s the added complexity of connecting a crypto wallet that supports their BAT token. That’s a whole different rabbit hole that only the most intrigued of users is going to investigate.
Then you learn that to properly connect that wallet, you need $15 of BAT? I mean with how much the shared reward program rewards a heavy browser user, it would take a decade to reach that full $15 wallet and that’s too high a price for a lot of people.
This is a huge problem. It’s like requiring a $15 minimum at a penny-stakes poker tournament. I would wager this is the biggest issue with the current implementation of the BAT.
How many people know how it works to switch to a new primary browser? On mobile, it might not be that intense but on a desktop? That’s a process that can be reversed in a switch of a keystroke. Ultimately, there are a lot of reasons why the Basic Attention Token is not doing well right now. It’s a niche product for a very niche concern.
Let me know what you think of my evaluation of the BAT token after a few years of use.
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