Why Self-Serve Ads are the Key to BAT Growth
If you hold Basic Attention Token (BAT), you have undoubtedly enjoyed the last few days (and the last few months for that matter). If you don’t own BAT, you may be disappointed that you missed the gains and think that it is to late to buy in. I’m just some guy on the Internet, but let me explain why I believe that it is not only not to late to enjoy big gains on BAT, but it is actually still very early.
Ignoring New Potential
Over the past several months, Brave has released their “Roadmap 2.0,” which introduces items several new things that they are working on. Each of which have the potential to drive the value of BAT up significantly. The DEX aggregator, the new DEX, the wallet, NFT use cases, and Themis are all exciting projects that will add incredible functionality to BAT and drive the price up. But they won’t be launched for months (or longer), so I’ll ignore them here.
Of course, they also announced their entry into the search market with the new Brave Search. This, of course, has massive potential to create new ad slots, each of which would require BAT purchases. Brave Search is expected to launch sometime mid-2021 though, so I’ll ignore the potential gains from this exciting step for now as well.
All Eyes on Self-Serve
So, what is going to be driving the big gains in the relative near-term? Self-serve. If you aren’t familiar with what this is, you really don’t understand why BAT has the potential to be a top-10 crypto, if not a top 5. I’ll try to provide a high-level overview of what self-serve is, and why it is really the foundation on which Brave Ads will grow.
What is Self-Serve?
Self-serve is the system that will allow companies that want to run ads on the Brave browser to create and manage the campaigns on their own. As of today, anyone who wants to create a new ad campaign needs to work directly with an account manager at Brave. This means Brave has a very limited total number of companies that they can work with at a given time. This ‘bottleneck’ in the new ad campaign process has resulted in a significant wait list for companies that want to run ads. It is also why Brave has a minimum monthly ad buy of between $2500 and $10,000, depending on a variety of factors.
When self-serve launches, companies will no longer have to work with a live human to set up a campaign. Instead, they can do it all through the self-serve portal. Brave may then have a human quickly review new campaigns for quality, etc, but even that step is likely to be unnecessary long term.
This streamlining of the process will allow all the companies that are currently on the wait-list to quickly create their campaigns and begin running ads. It will also eliminate the need for a minimum monthly ad buy, which opens up Brave ads to the millions of small to mid-sized companies around the world that want to run small, geo-targeted, ad campaigns of $100-$2500 per month.
What This Means for BAT Growth
When self-serve launches, we will almost certainly see a nice spike in price just from the fact that it will be very good news and will help to get the attention of speculators. The real boost, however, will come over the course of the following months (and years, really). Every new ad campaign that is created, whether for $100 or $1,000,000, will require a purchase of BAT to fund it.
There are literally millions of companies out there that run online ads today. A great many of them are dissatisfied with the price and performance of Facebook, Google, and other ad options. It has been very well-established that Brave ads are very effective, and for now at least, much more affordable than the alternatives.
In 2019, the total online ad spend in the US alone was approximately $125.2 billion. Let’s say that Brave is able to capture 1% of that. That is $1.25 billion per year, or $104,333,333 per month. This means there would be a monthly BAT purchase of over $100 million. And $100 million in BAT distributed to users of Brave each month (at least some of which would be held long term, and therefore removed from the ecosystem). What do you think that would do to the price of BAT? At today’s price of around $1.25/BAT, $100 million means a monthly BAT purchase of 83 million.
Ok, sure. Brave doesn’t even have 1% of the browser market (yet) so would they really get 1% of the online ads? Surely not on day one. But, also remember that that $100 million per month is 1% of the US online ad spend. Brave is a global company. Of course, it is impossible to predict what percentage of the global (or US) ad pie that Brave will have right away, and what kind of growth it will see. That being said, however, there is no doubt that Brave has done a great job at bringing in new users of their excellent browser and there is no doubt that companies are desperate to get their ads in front of these eyes.
So, with all that in mind, let me simply say to those who are concerned that they missed out on the gains from BAT. No, my friend, you really have not. BAT gains have not even begun yet.
(I feel obligated to remind my readers that I am just some idiot with a keyboard on the Internet. There is absolutely risk involved with BAT and all crypto. Do your own research. I hold BAT and love its future potential. Decide for yourself if it is a good investment for you too).