Mike - so glad I randomly clicked on new posts in cryptocurrency and came across your awesome post. I work in the financial industry and quite honestly had no clue as to how massive in monetary value and scope the advertising industry is. Your post is the type of add-value that makes Steemit so great.
While I don't have much to add regarding BAT(you make quite the optimistic case), have you heard of AdEx? They are essentially taking everything that is wrong with the advertising industry and making it right. Their white paper does a pretty good job at outlining the various challenges in the industry and how AdEx aims to solve them. Just to give you an idea, it is essentially the end user (people like you and me) who create a user profile that contains our interests and what ads we would WANT to see. It also talks about protection of user data as well. Not to mention, everything is done in a decentralized manner.
I would be curious to hear your thoughts and maybe even a comparison to BAT? Again, thank you for taking the time to churn out a quality post. I wish I could give you more upvotes!
AdEx Whitepaper:
https://www.adex.network/adex/AdEx-Whitepaper-v1.4.pdf
Hi, glad you liked the post.
I had a quick look at that project a few weeks ago and I don't really feel like it offers much different to what's already out there. It was a very quick skim through but as far as I can tell, it's pretty much just "A buys ad space. Publisher displays ad". That's what every ad network does and I don't see what's better about it.
The only difference really is that each publisher has to accept a bid on the ad space and honestly, I think that's much worse than existing models. I would be classed as a publisher on my sites. I have absolutely no desire to waste time clicking on ads I want to display - that should be the job of the ad network.
This will be fairly controversial but I am actually not that fussed either way about decentralization. In the case of ads for example, it puts a lot of responsiblity on the person displaying the ad. What happens if you accept an ad from a site that then changes the target page to display a virus or kiddy porn? That's then your responsibility when a user clicks it from your site. Centraliazation isn't all bad when it means there's a middle man who is legally responsible.
Ultimately what makes BAT good is that it will be the sole advertiser on Brave. My only real worry is whether someone will challenge the legality of blocking ads and then displaying their own ads. I believe the micro-donations will mitigate that problem and I don't know whether it would be viewed as illegal anyway but it's worth noting.