Dow Jones Media Group announced yesterday a partnership with Brave, an open code web browser capable of blocking ads. Dow Jones Media Group will distribute premium content through Brave. Moreover, the two companies will collaborate and test the blockchain technology behind the Basic Attention Token (BAT) for publishing and advertising purposes. Immediately after the announcement, the price of the BAT token went up by more than 40%. The price went from 0.30 US dollars per coin to 0.40 dollars, according to CoinMarketCap. The current price is 0.36 dollars.
The partnership was announced simultaneously by Brave and Dow Jones and presents a significant support for the blockchain technology in the content distribution sector, because Dow Jones is the publisher behind the Wall Street Journal in the United States and in Europe and Asia as well. Moreover, the company published Barron’s, a weekly magazine covering the financial markets sector and Market Watch, web portal covering the financial industry.
Daniel Bernard, the Senior Vice President at Barron’s said: “As global digital publishers, we believe it is important to continually explore new and emerging technologies that can be used to build quality customer experiences.”
As part of the agreement, a limited number of users who download Brave will get a free two-year subscription for Barron’s or Market Watch. According to AdWeek, Dow Jones will work with Brave to distribute content and ads as part of the subscription offered for free to the users. The value of a one-year subscription for Barron’s is normally 19.99 dollars per month or 240 dollars per year. Dow Jones will be joining the list of Brave’s verified publishers. This list includes around 12,000 publishers, such as the Washington Post, WikiHow and around 8,000 Twitch and YouTube creators.
Almar Latour, the Executive Vice President and Publisher at Dow Jones Media Group said: “We try and develop new ways of communicating with readers where we partner more freely perhaps than in other parts of the group. We have a keen interest in blockchain, privacy and how digital users interact with content.”
With this partnership, the people who use Brave can interact with the content provided by Dow Jones and earn BAT tokens in exchange, which they can later use to pay for the premium content offered by the publishing company. It is a form to motivate the users to interact with the content offered by Dow Jones.
Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Brave and former CEO of Mozilla said: “These are large platforms where we think that the creators have been undercompensated and sometimes been taken advantage of. We’re 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.”
In March last year, Brave introduced a concept where the users could tip their favorite website through micropayments in bitcoins. The company said: “This removes the need for intermediaries who may overwhelm web pages with invasive trackers and ads (and sometimes even malware). It also avoids centrally managed “feed” algorithms that may or may not value your idea of content quality.”
Later on, Brave also introduced the possibility for its users to reward their favorite youtubers by using BAT tokens. This is accomplished through Brave Payments, an option incorporated into Brave web browser.
