Aug 27. Batgrowth.com this morning announced that the Brave browser has officially added the multilingual encyclopedia portal Wikipedia to its growing list of verified publishers.
Alexa, the web traffic analysis tool, ranks the popular information sharing website at No. 7 in the global ranks for internet engagement.
The announcement marks the first top-10 site ever to make Brave’s verified publishers list and should consequently give the company more credibility in the online advertising space.
For those not in the know, Brave’s founders are betting heavily on an alternative online advertising future where their native cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT), is an integral part of the digital economy.
Brave Uptake Continues to Shine
Brave is directly competing with entrenched industry players like Google and Facebook who dominate online advertising with an iron fist-like authority.
Their new cryptocurrency-based model even rewards viewers who are willing to stick around and actually watch usually intrusive ads. A crazy but novel idea.
Batgrowth currently records over 30,000 verified publishers on the Brave platform with a noticeable uptick in applications for 2019.
Streaming publishers, in particular, continue to see impressive growth. Some of that will undoubtedly boil down to Google’s YouTube demonetization shenanigans.
Will Wikipedia’s contributors actually get paid Though?
According to Wikipedia’s own data, there are roughly 122,000 active editors who contribute actively to the site – all of them doing so on their own dime of course.
That ultimately begs the question though. How many, if any, of those contributors will actually get paid?
Well, from first impressions it appears that tips would actually go to Wikipedia the organization and not necessarily to any of its contributors directly. That ultimately means that it’s once again up to a centralized authority to distribute the funds.
Not the ideal situation for a “decentralized ad exchange.” To be fair though, Wikipedia is a complex system of contribution. Cutting up an equal piece of the pie for its army of editors sounds like an unenviable prospect.
Perhaps you’re thinking about rewarding one of those selfless souls yourself? It’s probably a good idea to get them on Twitter first. They might just consider the offer, unlike the POTUS.