The Dow Jones Media Group and the Blockchain-powered privacy-oriented web browser Brave have formed a partnership to test Blockchain technology in digital advertising, according to a press release published yesterday, April 18.
Brave, which was developed by the Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla, raised $35 mln in 30 seconds durings its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the Basic Attention Token (BAT) held last June.
Through its new partnership with the Dow Jones Media Group, the Brave browser reports it will provide access to either Dow Jones Media Group’s brands Barrons.com or the MarketWatch newsletters to a limited number of users, as the two sites will become “verified publishers” on Brave’s BAT platform. According to AdWeek, Brave browser users earn BAT tokens by engaging with ad content from verified publishers, now including these two Dow Jones Media Group brands. The platform reports that BAT tokens can then be used to pay for premium content.
Eich told Adweek that Brave seeks to cut out the middleman in the ad industry, stating that they are “trying to reconnect the funding that comes in gross payments after the fact from advertisers and gets chopped down by a bunch of middle players—notably Google—and the remnants are given to publishers”:
“We’d like to improve the efficiency of that system by cutting out the middle players and help publishers directly connect to their readers.”
Dow Jones Media Group and Brave will be “test[ing] a number of innovative solutions in the news and information space,” like working with “consent-based” ads that give consumers the chance to affirm their interest in seeing the ad, AdWeek reports.
Senior vice president at Barron’s, Daniel Bernard, said in the press release that the partnership is an “exciting and innovative step for Dow Jones Media Group,” and publisher of Dow Jones Media Group Almar Latour said that the company has a “keen interest in [B]lockchain, privacy, and how digital users interact with content,” according to AdWeek.
Yesterday, IBM and Salon Media announced a similarly-themed partnership for a pilot Proof-of-Concept Blockchain product designed to cut out intermediaries between advertisers, publishers, and consumers. Salon had already experimented with other ways around traditional advertising revenue this year, when they offered users a slightly misleading choice between seeing ads or letting the site use their “unused computing power,” aka crypto mining without saying mining.