Developed by Brendan Eich, the Basic Attention Token is a project that aims to make the online advertising space better for everyone.
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is a digital advertising token which is built on the Ethereum blockchain. The purpose of BAT is to create an ad exchange marketplace which will connect advertisers, publishers and users in a decentralized manner so as to monetize user attention and remove all the other needless expenditure related to ad networks.
In brief, users get paid to provide their attention to ads. The system has to be fair to all the participants: users, advertisers and content publishers.
BAT works in the Brave browser which gets rid of all ads, but if you turn them on, you get paid for watching ads.