Image: Tax Credits/Flickr

Online advertising is broken, and broken in a way that’s not just inefficient, but invasive of privacy and corrosive to the quality of the whole web experience. Ads dramatically increase data usage and load times—an investigation from the The New York Times in 2015 found that when loading the top 50 news sites more than half of all data transmitted came from ads —and the covert installation of ad trackers which record users’ browsing preference across websites is an “alarmingly widespread” practice according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation .

In light of this, re-modelling online advertising could be an an all-round winner, better for marketers, publishers and the consumers alike. And this is the task that Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla, has set for himself, first with the ad blocking Brave browser and now with the launch of the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a digital currency token which will integrate with the Brave platform to directly monetize users’ attention, and help advertisers serve them fewer but more targeted ads.

Source:  Motherboard –  The Creator of JavaScript Just Launched a Cryptocurrency to Improve Online Ads