The creator of Javascript is using blockchain to save the internet from ads #Blockchain
Brendan Eich hopes to redesign how advertising works on the internet. A new platform utilizes “Basic Attention Token” to assign value for user attention. Via Digital Trends:
Every targeted advertisement you see on your smartphone is likely bounced through a variety of ad exchange networks, buy- and sell-side servers, placement verification services, and data management platforms, before reaching your device. These data transfers do more than make pages load slower. They also eat into your data plan and drain your battery. It costs you a fraction of a cent per ad, but those fractions add up.
A report from the New York Times found that 50 percent of mobile data transferred during visits to popular news websites was a result of ads. Depending on the cost of your mobile data plan, that means you could be paying up to $23 per month just to see ads you never asked for.
Broadly speaking, Eich’s solution is an attempt to wipe the slate clean and put a better system in place, one where you aren’t assaulted with ads, and where the lion’s share of the money spent by advertisers doesn’t fall into the hands of middlemen.
The system is made up of two main parts, the first of which is a new browser called Brave. In Eich’s own words, Brave is “a privacy focused browser that puts users first and blocks third-party ads and trackers by default.” That means you receive not just a clean, ad-free, and fast browsing experience, but also that your privacy isn’t compromised by an onslaught of tracking bugs and cookies.
It’s true that you could achieve a similar result in Chrome or Firefox by installing a handful of extensions, but Brave does both ad blocking and tracker blocking simultaneously — and at all times — from the moment you fire it up. It also keeps nifty stats on the number of ads you’ve blocked over time, and how much time you’ve saved because of faster, tracker-free page loads.