Archive.org Celebrates BAT Token Contributions, Hints at a “Web of the Future” Not Relying on Ads for Profits

Archive.org has proven to be an incredibly popular site, providing consumers with the ability to look through old websites or look through free content. The website recently posted to Twitter regarding the holdings that they have in the Basic Attention Token, which is a result of the contributions made to the non-profit website to keep it going.

Thanks to @brave and its alternative to the ad-supported web — we just counted up the micropayments in our tip jar, and it’s anything but tiny! https://t.co/zlERME1GFG

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) April 15, 2019

Reported by CCN, the publication commented that they had seen about the same amount of BAT contributed to their platform, finding that it was not “something worth celebrating.” Clearly, Archive.org does not have the same opinion, saying that they entered this “experiment” as a way to

“try out something new.”

It was not until last week that the company connected their Brave creator account to their cryptocurrency wallet. With small micropayments over the last 2 years, the company had received a little over 9,000 BAT, which has a value of around $3,000, based on today’s data from CoinMarketCap.

According to data collected by CCN through Estibot, the Archive.org domain is worth about $183,000, though there are some factors omitted. CCN alleges that the data does not include “the fact that it probably couldn’t be sold.” Based on the data on the donation page, the average contribution is about $45. The website also notes that with contributions as small as $5 per visitor, their content will continue to be free and have no advertisements.

The cost of running Archive.org appears to be about the same as Wikipedia’s cost of operation, among other free content websites. The systems allow users to store entire websites for free, which takes up a substantial amount of storage and data, depending on the size of the content. There are well over 330 billion web pages presently stored with Archive.org, which CCN says cannot be supported by BAT alone, nor is it supposed to be. In 2017 alone, Archive.org saw over $17 million in contributions, according to the State of California.

Even though the donated contribution in BAT seems small to some publications, Archive.org is more excited about the symbolic gesture of it all. The funding, after all, was “unexpected,” as Archive.org puts it. They added that the receipt of any BAT at all is “proof that the current web… doesn’t have to be the web of the future.”

Advertisements reside on nearly every website, with some using an algorithm that tracks the habits of users to have better chances of making purchases. However, not everyone is a fan of the “new” model. CCN is a perfect example, as they comment on the “many ways to deal with such advertisements without killing off one of the last egalitarians and truly free industries out there in online content.” While the online publication praises the browser Mozilla for “thwarting trackers by default,” CCN says that the Brave token is “siphoning off website revenue,” while the publishers of these websites only receive “a paltry cut.”