Investing in the Future of User Generated Content

It's no secret that User Generated Content (UGC) is going to be a mainstream conversation now and in the near-long term future. As I mentioned in one of my posts yesterday, UGC is the very thing that made companies like Facebook and Google extraordinarily rich. The vast amounts of content, data and user information that has been gathered over the last 2 decades is only continuing to grow at a rapid pace.

My belief is that crypto is bringing a radical shift to that landscape. There is a convergence of technologies happening right now that is making it easier than ever to launch a platform, build a community around it, tokenize it and share the benefits of UGC with the people who are doing the legwork -- the users.

I spend my day-to-day working on LeoFinance. Building the community, adding new tools and developing new interfaces and features that are all aimed at the purpose of making LeoFinance fulfill a very specific mission: Users can come to our platform, contribute content, ideas and engagement on the topics that they love talking about (finance & crypto) and earn fractionalized ownership on the platform in the form of LEO tokens.

The beauty is that LeoFinance is not unique in this idea. There are a number of other platforms out there that are working on the same mission of flipping the tables on the wealthiest 1% and redistributing the value of UGC back to the actual people who put in the work. There are two platforms in particular that I have spent an enormous amount of time and resources on which also (in my opinion), have an incredible opportunity to become massively distributed ecosystems to be reckoned with:

1. Hive
2. Brave & BAT

In this post, I'll focus on the Brave & BAT ecosystem and how they are approaching this idea of bringing value back to the users, creators and even the advertisers.. cutting out the "Facebooks" of the world.

Brave: Fighting the Establishment

Brendan Eich (founder of Brave) is a legendary developer who has flipped to the side of the users and crypto-enthusiasts. In founding Brave & BAT, his core focus has been to fight the old ideas of the establishment and drive value back to us — the users.

The general idea of Brave & BAT is to bring in advertising revenue (in the form of BAT and other currencies), advertise on the platform in a non-intrusive and datas-sparing manner and then redistribute that value back to the users in exchange for their attention and publishers based on their content creation and audience.

In this scenario everyone wins… everyone except the “Facebook’s” of the world. The advertisers get a more engaged audience (often at even more discounted rates than centralized platforms), users earn some BAT for their attention on the ads and publishers earn BAT based on their UGC and the audience that they’ve built.

"In a February 2018 Post, Brendan publicly complained that YouTube was ripping off content creators by underpaying despite making a fortune from free user-generated content.

Drumming for BAT–the Brave browser token, he announced plans of creating a reward system for YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and other creators.

Through the Brave’s Creator Referral System, over $12 million has so far been disbursed to creators.” - btcmanager

Brave already has a lot of built-in features that make it far superior to any alternative. Once you go Brave, you truly never want to go back. Since downloading Brave, I’ve uninstalled Chrome and won’t go back to using it. Brave is faster, has better privacy features, and only shows me ads if I choose to see them.. and if I choose to see the ads, I actually earn BAT for them.

The model is beautiful and there is no denying that.. but the title of this post is about investing in the future of UGC. So what does an investment in UGC look like when it comes to Brave & BAT?

For me, that means buying the BAT token and using the Brave browser. I’ve been accumulating BAT over the past few years and have been especially heavy-handed the past few months as we saw the price dip down while all the fundamental metrics were pointing up.

• Users on the Brave browser have been increasing
• Verified publishers on Brave have been increasing
• BAT buybacks from ad revenue have been increasing
• Major public figureheads have talked about Brave (i.e. Joe Rogan)

Every fundamental signal imaginable screams in the direction of BAT going up over the long-term. As I said, their model of redistributing value to users and content creators is incredibly simple and effective. They also have a network effect going for them in terms of the Brave browser. I personally sign up all my friends and family to the Brave browser and tell them to use it.

The key to the browser model is that the user doesn’t even need to use crypto if they don’t want to bother with it. That means that I can onboard even the most technologically non-savvy people to Brave and to them, it just looks like any other browser with maybe a few less ads and some speed improvements.

Over time, they may get prompted about BAT rewards and how they can click a few buttons to claim rewards and see ads — if they choose to.

Buying BAT

BAT Price Analysis and Buy Zone on 6/22/20

This is a recent analysis I did on the BAT token. Obviously I’m no TA expert, so take that chart with a grain of salt. I’ve been picking up a few tricks during our LEO roundtable podcast episodes and created a simple quadrant to identify a possible range where BAT might be a cheap buy (relative to recent history).

Granted, I’ve accumulated much of the BAT that I plan to hold for the future.. so if BAT just skyrockets from here (which it has been doing the past week), I won’t mind. If it drops down, however, I already have a ladder limit set to buy on the way down in that purple range (1800-2200 SATS).

 

 

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