Is participating in the BAT ICO a good idea?
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?
I was worried about participating in this ioc.
Great post. Bats is very interesting to me, it has a great creator who has been successful so far. It's too early to tell whether this will be a success or not. I'm not convinced enough to invest just yet. I will be keeping a close eye on the project.
Can you source this? While I'm not saying this isn't true, how do you know?
I can't, and I don't know. All I can do is assume the world's largest ad budgets aren't ideologically against pixel based audience re-targeting and reword it to this:
Satisfactory? Are we quenched?
I have similar feelings due to it being tied to a browser that has failed to gain a lot of users and I just don't see this pulling massive amounts of people to it. Of course we could be wrong and this could be the missing piece that gets people to switch to using their browser to for these tokens. But it's a big ??
I'm with you on EOS!
Funny thing is, none of that matters for a successful ICO launch to turn a profit.