In my opinion, no.
I've been in digital advertising for a long time. A really long time. Over 15 years in fact, and I don't think BAT (Basic Attention Token) is going to "disrupt Google," Facebook or really anything at all. The creator of JavaScript is involved, and that's cool, but here's what isn't:
- They're cross-promoting a browser with no market share.
- BAT is ideologically against pixel tracking/re-targeting, which is one of the most widely used and valuable techniques in digital advertising.
- The dreaded "middlemen" of digital advertising, people and platforms, usually take very light margins and provide necessary services.
- People still (and always will) work out direct advertising deals with publishers all the time. It happens constantly. Someone will approach the owner of a specific website, app, etc. in their niche and bang out a deal directly.
In their whitepaper they make the following claim:
> In-device machine learning will match truly relevant ads to content from a level that
middlemen with cookies and third party tracking are unable to achieve
The bottom line is that while BAT may be ideologically against pixel tracking and audience re-targeting, I can tell you what, imho, most likely isn't ideologically against it: the world's largest advertising budgets. I'll be keeping far, far away from this one and holding out for EOS. I just don't see it even coming close to mainstream adoption or capturing a significant chunk of the web browser market share.
Though, of course, I could be totally wrong. I should also point out that this submission was written with HODL oriented investors in mind. I'll make no comment as to whether it's a good short term investment. I will however say that I've seen chatter of people planning to buy @ ICO and immediately dump BAT onto exchanges as soon as they're able.
What say you, steemians?