BAT is humming: A giant website (200-300 million monthly visitors) is considering BAT to monetize their content
The speculation about which site could be the next publisher to use BAT is heating up after Eich spoke on the whatbitcoindid podcast (53m:50s) and said this:
I’m gonna tell a story about a site and you can guess which it is, has 80 million adblocking users a month…many more non adblocking, they are ready to try something with us, they are ready to convert those users to Brave users.
Adblocker adoption rate is around 30% so we are talking about a site with 200-300m visitors. There is no other hint which site could it be aside of the number of users which has proven to be enough for BAT and crypto fans in general to start crunching the numbers in an effort to guess what is the site in question. One thing is for sure, it is one of the world’s biggest websites.
So let’s dive in the speculation to see what is plausible:
“Assuming 80m users represent the 20-40% of users ad blocking a site gets (wide range from reports I find), that can mean total monthly users for the site is 400m or 200m.
Sites like that are Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon, then Google and Facebook at least for US viewership.
Reddit is 90m MAU so too small based off these figures. See https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites/”
Out of the mentioned websites, Google, Facebook and Amazon are too big and to sovereign in their decision making to rely on a third-party to monetize their platforms. We can exclude them. That leaves us with Wikipedia and Twitter.
Twitter CEO is a known crypto fan and that isn’t too surprising. In addition to serving as the CEO of Twitter, Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, which added the option to buy and sell Bitcoin directly from the Square Cash app back in March.
Wikipedia on the other side is not known to be either pro or contra bitcoin – but they do accept BTC as donations via Bitpay. Wikipedia claims to have nearly 650 million monthly-active users / vistitors so for them to only have 80M users using adblock that would be <12.5% of their visitors which is very low compared to the internet average. 80M users using adblock would be more normal for sites in the 250-400M monthly users range.
But it could also be Reddit. Even though, website traffic tracking tools rank Reddit at much lower user numbers per month (around 90 million), Reddit themselves claim that number to be much higher – 350 million per month. In that case, the 80 million ad blocking users fits the overall average (20-40% users on the internet use ad blockers). Reddit does have a history of problematic monetization of their platform so BAT could indeed be the ideal solution for them.
?Learn how you can create a paper wallet – click here to read more about crypto wallets.
Reddit CEO Alexis Ohanian is also a professed bitcoin and crypto supporter, he also characterized decentralized cryptocurrencies as a “changing sign of the times,” while tempering his stance to emphasize that he “is not calling for the end of fiat or anything like that.” Nonetheless, he said, crypto is rapidly developing into a “viable alternative that is showing more and more credibility over time”.
Read our comparison of Brave vs Firefox.
Other, less stellar speculations on which site could it be are: theguardian.com that has 280 million visitors per month and is already a verified publisher on Brave. Any successful trial with a news(paper) website would create interest from others, as they all struggle with the issues that Brave intends to fix (or at least minimize). Bonus points if any paywall or donation request is automatically turned off for people that contribute BAT to these sites.
Honestly, no matter which of the mentioned websites it is, that is going to be a huge boost for BAT adoption. The whole crypto market can also be very happy about it, the more engines are powering crypto jet, the better.
