BAT Mercury- Understanding the technical updates in the new release

The BAT team officially announced that their Mercury update will be released on Friday October 6th. For those not familiar with the project, BAT or the Basic Attention Token aims to create a system for rewarding content consumers on the internet for their attention to display ads. To understand the necessity of such a system, it is important to understand the current state of internet advertising. Currently, user experience is degraded by the multiple ads they have to tolerate just to browse the web as well as the invasion of privacy from the use of cookies and trackers to track their browsing behavior in order to allow advertisers to better optimize their targeting campaign. The system benefits publishers who gain ad revenue and advertisers who gain access to user data but this comes at the expense of user experience with slow websites that consume both data and battery time and well as the intrusive nature of the ads themselves. This has led users to increasingly adopt ad blocking software in a neverending arms race to stay ahead of the sophisticated ad targeting systems currently being used to collect and monetize user data.

The BAT project aims to re-align the incentives in this system to reward users who choose to give their time and attention to ads during their viewing experience. Now most individuals immediately interpret the goals of this project as "paying users to view ads" which is a distorted understanding of the way the incentives should align if the project is successful. The intent is not to have users agree to viewing ads during their browsing experience as a way to make money. The project is better conceptualized as changing the current ad viewing experience from one where the user is made to opt in to viewing ads by default and has to expend effort to opt out of ads by either getting an adblocker or paying a subscription to the websites they currently view for free to one where the system is opt out by default and the publisher and advertiser have to pay users to opt in to viewing ads thus rewarding them for the potential value their attention to ads can generate for the advertisers and publishers.

The first step to achieving this goal in the BAT road map https://basicattentiontoken.org/bat-roadmap-1-0/ is the brave browser.

The browser is actually a released product and can be downloaded here https://brave.com/

The browser is the first step in the BAT roadmap as it is a browser that blocks ads by default. Hence any ad delivery to the users of this browser will have to be opt in by the user and users will need to be incentivized with the BAT token to opt into ads. So the immediate question that most people ask is why would advertisers pay users to view ads in that browser and conceptually it becomes an issue of market share. If enough users who value privacy and are interested in a simple ad block solution migrate to the browser, the BAT token becomes to only way to target that group of users hence it is essentially a system that transfers the control of how the ad viewing system is monetized from the advertiser to the user. Users will be able to make a choice of how much it is worth it to them to agree to be shown ads while browsing a website and advertisers will have to choose how much they are willing to reward users who choose to opt in to viewing ads.

The next step of the BAT project is BAT Mercury which is due to be released on Friday, October 6th. The main technical update in this release that will progress the project is the integration of the BAT token and wallet into the Brave browser. This is not a small advance as it will immediately allow the incentive system to be deployed in the real world allowing publishers to better understand how much value a user's attention to ads is worth and how much they are willing to reward that value with the BAT token. It will also allow users to understand how much the compensation for allowing ads is worth compared to the the pleasure of a completely ad free experience. There will likely be a balance with a segment of users who value a completely ad free experience and for whom the compensation in BAT will not be worth it vs the segment of users who don't mind passively accumulating BAT just for what will be for them a their usual browsing experience if they know they can then use that BAT in many ways including using it to support their favorite websites. Imagine agreeing to view ads on espn.com in order to gain BAT tokens that can then be used to purchase access to their most exclusive content (ESPN insider) which users currently have to pay a subscription fee for. This same model can be applied to a lot of websites who typically force users to pay to gain access to some of their content. The BAT token would allow users to agree to view ads in exchange for being rewarded with something they can use to support their favorite websites or gain access to content that is currently behind paywalls.

So in summary, the BAT Mercury release will be a significant step forward in the real world implementation of this new incentive model for publishers, advertisers and users. I would be interested in hearing feedback from readers about any potential flaws they see in such a model.