Blockchain will answer: how to solve the main problems of ineffective and annoying online advertising
Advertising is fed up - and fed up so much that even tired of talking about it. When commercial television came to Russia, an advertisement came into our homes with it, for which the unprepared post-Soviet viewer had to get used to from scratch. Soon, interest was replaced by annoyance, which was reflected, among other things, in numerous jokes and anecdotes about advertising. Now there is no effect of novelty, advertising has become less discussed - but the irritation has not disappeared anywhere. And the relocation of a significant part of the audience, and after it the advertisement itself, to the Internet did not improve the situation, but in some ways aggravated it. A US study for September 2017 noted dissatisfaction with the excess advertising of YouTube and other social networks among adolescents. Changing tastes, fashion, products, which chooses a new generation, but it remains his everlasting hostility to advertising.
People suffer from an abundance of advertising, but there are also other problems for the advertisers themselves.
Gray traffic is a real disaster for the digital advertising industry. In the market volume of more than $ 200 billion annually (and this amount is only growing), up to half of the money goes to the owners of botnets and other unscrupulous owners of Internet resources, developers, advertising agencies. According to this year's international research , up to 50% of the advertising budget is “fused” into bots, bad non-working targeting and dishonest intermediaries in the procurement chain-advertising demonstration. The main problem of the modern advertising market on the Internet is that the advertiser receives only a limited amount of information about his campaign. Yes, an advertiser can track generally accepted indicators, such as clicks, views, time spent on a resource, but this is only the tip of the iceberg, the true effectiveness of these indicators depends on their cost and quality, which cannot be traced and tested on the long-established Internet advertising market.
')
After all, it is she who is commemorated in vain in outraged remarks like “advertising zadolbala!”. Whereas the problem is not advertising - and advertising, in fact, has never been a problem. The problem is unnecessary advertising. Unnecessary advertising is not only the nerve cells of the recipient, but also wasted money from the business that paid for it. This is just an informational noise that does not benefit anyone, except, perhaps, for the intermediaries who organize it.
However, advertisers are trying to keep up with the times: now a significant part of advertising is targeted, i.e. aimed at a specific category of users - housewives, managers, fishermen, lovers of tasty food, etc. And here a problem arises of a different nature: too much information about users that is aggregated throughout the Network, often aggregated without their knowledge. There is no transparency in this matter, and it is often very difficult to find out exactly what data is collected and why.
In general, the current advertising market is imperfect and very problematic for all interested participants. If you try to systematize its weak points, you’ll have a list of six problems that concern different sides of this market - users, advertisers - in the end, disfigure the industry as a whole.
Irrelevant ads. Thanks to targeting systems, the effectiveness of online advertising is growing - from the point of view of advertisers and only in relative terms. If you look at the absolute figures, the percentage of conversion from ads that are shown to everyone indiscriminately increased to a few percent of the conversion of ads that are configured using the entire available targeting toolkit. Is there a tenfold increase in efficiency? There is. But, on the other hand, more than 90–95% of users do not care, as they saw the advertisements they did not need, so they see. So, globally nothing has changed.
When advertising is not interesting, humor can save it.
If not and its - users are furious
Lack of privacy. Most of the resources, sites and services promise visitors the integrity of personal data. At the same time, even the largest online companies like Facebook are often accused of users of undocumented use of data from specific users. For example, a person’s location data is used to find nearby friends or companies that might interest him. The company can simply take the data of a person and use it for personal purposes, without requesting any kind of permission, as it should be in a normal situation. Even those users who are not users of a social network are tracked . Not only Facebook suffers like this. Result - the user receives neither compensation nor the promised immunity of information.
The lack of a unified standard for unscrewing targeted advertising. The problem with an irrelevant display of advertising as relevant as ever. But to achieve relevance is quite difficult, because, firstly, there is no unified technology for collecting and processing user data (of course, we are talking about the process approved by the user). Secondly, the companies that collect the data do not exchange information, and for different companies the identity of the same user may look different. The result is the complete indifference of users to non-thematic and useless advertising for them. Accordingly, problems arise for advertisers, who waste their money in vain. Some of them, for this reason, cut their advertising budgets by hundreds of millions of US dollars.
Lack of transparency. And the problem is not only that user data is transmitted by someone unknown, it is not clear to whom. And the user hardly likes the option when his data, collected without his knowledge, is also sold to some advertising agency. Users in some cases file lawsuits or complain to regulators that social networks or search services collect real data of their users (names, income level, interests, etc.). But this does not stop big business from collecting such data, since they are of particular interest to corporations. Facebook was fined , punishing the use of these users, but so far the regulators have not had much effect. There is also no transparency for the advertiser himself - he pays money for effective advertising for his audience, however the budget from the advertiser to the site “goes” a long way through all possible intermediaries who sometimes do not carry any value and uniqueness by their actions, but “devour” the budget bots, intermediaries, additional services designed, supposedly, to increase efficiency.
Cheating advertisers. The affected party is not only users, but also advertisers. In addition to the above problems for the advertised business, there is more - even user data can be fake, fake. Such information is generated by special algorithms in order to deceive the advertiser, getting paid for it. The most common example is click-fraud , but there are other ways of cheating, including cheating the viewing of commercials on certain sites (even specialized studies are being conducted on this topic). It is clear that advertisers are also not too happy with the current situation, because only on this they lose billions of US dollars ( from $ 12 to $ 17 billion a year ). And a lot of other budget traps.
High costs. Despite the fact that online advertising is a digital product, quite an analogue money is required to run advertising - as a rule, of course, fiat (normal, not crypto) currencies. Accounting has never been a simple matter, and the accompanying financial, legal and administrative difficulties increase the cost of a business to manage its advertising activities - after all, it turns out that it is not enough just to start an advertising campaign, you need to seriously invest in addition to its control, administration, and the fight against various fraud traffic , efficiency analysis - respectively for additional services and intermediaries.
No longer. As the mathematical proverb says, a correctly formulated condition of the problem is half its solution. If we approach the six problems of the advertising market as six problems, here they are:
This is how the concept of a new architecture emerges, which can change the advertising market for the better forever. And advertising, as a useful tool, free from the curse of undeserved hatred. The main challenge here is - is it possible to solve such multidirectional tasks within one platform or solution?
The Russian project of a fundamentally new economy of digital advertising, Papyrus, managed to do this. Not only the Kommersant newspaper , but also a large number of world-class publications said that it was the future that was already becoming a reality.
This is the world's first decentralized ecosystem for digital advertising, with high scalability, allowing to process billions of advertising impressions daily. It will bring together users, owners of Internet resources, advertisers and developers of decentralized applications (dApps), allowing them to interact on the basis of transparency and mutual benefit and created by specialists of the sphere to solve all major problems of the modern digital marketing market.
The blockchain, also called the “network of trust”, is a database with a unique architecture that guarantees the transparency and immutability of any entries in it. From this one wording, half of the big six problems of the online advertising market immediately follow.
But this is only in the first approximation. Only the blockchain is not enough here - the cost of maintaining it must be justified and it makes no sense to keep all the logs of all transactions in it. Transparency is also achieved as a result of payments in the form of tokens and the use of blockchains to control the integrity and history of data on transactions placed in separate repositories - which is extremely important in the case of dealing with gray traffic. Papyrus is built on the blockchain platform and Ethereum smart contracts, a network of state channels and a reliable decentralized data repository. The architecture consists of 4 layers, the components of each of which are developed as open source software.
The Papyrus project is the first of its kind for which a technological architecture has been developed, which allows to circumvent the well-known scalability problems of blockchains. The scalability of the Papyrus project will allow you to quickly and seamlessly grow to any volume that the market requires from it, processing billions of ad impressions on a daily basis. Studying the possibilities of the blockchain, Papyrus specialists were able, on its basis, to design a solution that not only expels the six demons of the advertising market, but also provides additional completely new possibilities :
At the moment, a working prototype of the Papyrus advertising ecosystem is ready and the first real integrations in the advertising market begin.
Papyrus is already launching a pilot integration with AirPush, one of the largest advertising platforms in the world — over 300,000 applications use its SDK. AirPush, being an SSP platform, has been struggling with fraudulent traffic for many years, striving for transparency, protecting the interests of advertisers and publishers, and giving the latter opportunities to monetize the collected user data. The upcoming cooperation will help both companies in researching new technologies.
Also, Papyrus and FraudScore have concluded a strategic partnership agreement - FraudScore will be the first ecosystem-related auditor.
Papurus creates a transparent advertising ecosystem on the blockchain to ensure the absence of fraudulent activity and bot traffic. FraudScore is the largest mobile traffic analyst that has processed more than 257 million applications for mobile applications up to this point.
In early October, Papyrus has already signed a contract with a large blockchain project - the Bancor platform, which is developing and popularizing a protocol - a standard for creating constantly traded Ethereum ERC20 tokens. Thanks to the cooperation with Bancor, users of the Papyrus ecosystem will have access to a token changer - a mechanism for automatic and instant exchange for Ethereum cryptocurrency (ETH) and for tokens of any other projects cooperating with Bancor.
Another strategic partner is BitClave, a decentralized search platform with which the user can find any product or service he needs. Cooperation projects will create a complete system for individual proposals. In this ecosystem, BitClave handles instant search queries when a user comes for a product or service. Collected information about users, if they give their permission, can be provided to advertisers connected to the Papyrus ecosystem, which gives them the opportunity to fine-tune the targeting of their ads using contextual information. Also, BitClave offers will be displayed on Papyrus sites, which will increase their effectiveness. In the classic advertising ecosystem, this mechanism is called commodity remarketing. A distinctive feature is that the user can receive compensation for interacting with relevant, useful ads and offers.
To translate their vision into reality, the Papyrus team entered ICO crowdfunding , which will end on November 2.
CryptoCommunity, blockchain-enthusiasts, users tired of irrelevant advertising and businessmen tormented by overpayments for other people's mistakes and deception will be able to support the idea with voice and ruble by purchasing PPR project tokens on the project website papyrus.global .
People suffer from an abundance of advertising, but there are also other problems for the advertisers themselves.
Gray traffic is a real disaster for the digital advertising industry. In the market volume of more than $ 200 billion annually (and this amount is only growing), up to half of the money goes to the owners of botnets and other unscrupulous owners of Internet resources, developers, advertising agencies. According to this year's international research , up to 50% of the advertising budget is “fused” into bots, bad non-working targeting and dishonest intermediaries in the procurement chain-advertising demonstration. The main problem of the modern advertising market on the Internet is that the advertiser receives only a limited amount of information about his campaign. Yes, an advertiser can track generally accepted indicators, such as clicks, views, time spent on a resource, but this is only the tip of the iceberg, the true effectiveness of these indicators depends on their cost and quality, which cannot be traced and tested on the long-established Internet advertising market.
')
Poor users? Poor advertisement!
After all, it is she who is commemorated in vain in outraged remarks like “advertising zadolbala!”. Whereas the problem is not advertising - and advertising, in fact, has never been a problem. The problem is unnecessary advertising. Unnecessary advertising is not only the nerve cells of the recipient, but also wasted money from the business that paid for it. This is just an informational noise that does not benefit anyone, except, perhaps, for the intermediaries who organize it.
However, advertisers are trying to keep up with the times: now a significant part of advertising is targeted, i.e. aimed at a specific category of users - housewives, managers, fishermen, lovers of tasty food, etc. And here a problem arises of a different nature: too much information about users that is aggregated throughout the Network, often aggregated without their knowledge. There is no transparency in this matter, and it is often very difficult to find out exactly what data is collected and why.
Six demons of the traditional online advertising market
In general, the current advertising market is imperfect and very problematic for all interested participants. If you try to systematize its weak points, you’ll have a list of six problems that concern different sides of this market - users, advertisers - in the end, disfigure the industry as a whole.
Irrelevant ads. Thanks to targeting systems, the effectiveness of online advertising is growing - from the point of view of advertisers and only in relative terms. If you look at the absolute figures, the percentage of conversion from ads that are shown to everyone indiscriminately increased to a few percent of the conversion of ads that are configured using the entire available targeting toolkit. Is there a tenfold increase in efficiency? There is. But, on the other hand, more than 90–95% of users do not care, as they saw the advertisements they did not need, so they see. So, globally nothing has changed.
When advertising is not interesting, humor can save it.
If not and its - users are furious
Lack of privacy. Most of the resources, sites and services promise visitors the integrity of personal data. At the same time, even the largest online companies like Facebook are often accused of users of undocumented use of data from specific users. For example, a person’s location data is used to find nearby friends or companies that might interest him. The company can simply take the data of a person and use it for personal purposes, without requesting any kind of permission, as it should be in a normal situation. Even those users who are not users of a social network are tracked . Not only Facebook suffers like this. Result - the user receives neither compensation nor the promised immunity of information.
The lack of a unified standard for unscrewing targeted advertising. The problem with an irrelevant display of advertising as relevant as ever. But to achieve relevance is quite difficult, because, firstly, there is no unified technology for collecting and processing user data (of course, we are talking about the process approved by the user). Secondly, the companies that collect the data do not exchange information, and for different companies the identity of the same user may look different. The result is the complete indifference of users to non-thematic and useless advertising for them. Accordingly, problems arise for advertisers, who waste their money in vain. Some of them, for this reason, cut their advertising budgets by hundreds of millions of US dollars.
Lack of transparency. And the problem is not only that user data is transmitted by someone unknown, it is not clear to whom. And the user hardly likes the option when his data, collected without his knowledge, is also sold to some advertising agency. Users in some cases file lawsuits or complain to regulators that social networks or search services collect real data of their users (names, income level, interests, etc.). But this does not stop big business from collecting such data, since they are of particular interest to corporations. Facebook was fined , punishing the use of these users, but so far the regulators have not had much effect. There is also no transparency for the advertiser himself - he pays money for effective advertising for his audience, however the budget from the advertiser to the site “goes” a long way through all possible intermediaries who sometimes do not carry any value and uniqueness by their actions, but “devour” the budget bots, intermediaries, additional services designed, supposedly, to increase efficiency.
Cheating advertisers. The affected party is not only users, but also advertisers. In addition to the above problems for the advertised business, there is more - even user data can be fake, fake. Such information is generated by special algorithms in order to deceive the advertiser, getting paid for it. The most common example is click-fraud , but there are other ways of cheating, including cheating the viewing of commercials on certain sites (even specialized studies are being conducted on this topic). It is clear that advertisers are also not too happy with the current situation, because only on this they lose billions of US dollars ( from $ 12 to $ 17 billion a year ). And a lot of other budget traps.
High costs. Despite the fact that online advertising is a digital product, quite an analogue money is required to run advertising - as a rule, of course, fiat (normal, not crypto) currencies. Accounting has never been a simple matter, and the accompanying financial, legal and administrative difficulties increase the cost of a business to manage its advertising activities - after all, it turns out that it is not enough just to start an advertising campaign, you need to seriously invest in addition to its control, administration, and the fight against various fraud traffic , efficiency analysis - respectively for additional services and intermediaries.
And how long can we endure all this?
No longer. As the mathematical proverb says, a correctly formulated condition of the problem is half its solution. If we approach the six problems of the advertising market as six problems, here they are:
- poor user experience;
- lack of confidentiality;
- unreliable targeting;
- lack of transparency;
- fraud;
- high administrative costs.
This is how the concept of a new architecture emerges, which can change the advertising market for the better forever. And advertising, as a useful tool, free from the curse of undeserved hatred. The main challenge here is - is it possible to solve such multidirectional tasks within one platform or solution?
Blockchain named "Papyrus"
The Russian project of a fundamentally new economy of digital advertising, Papyrus, managed to do this. Not only the Kommersant newspaper , but also a large number of world-class publications said that it was the future that was already becoming a reality.
This is the world's first decentralized ecosystem for digital advertising, with high scalability, allowing to process billions of advertising impressions daily. It will bring together users, owners of Internet resources, advertisers and developers of decentralized applications (dApps), allowing them to interact on the basis of transparency and mutual benefit and created by specialists of the sphere to solve all major problems of the modern digital marketing market.
The blockchain, also called the “network of trust”, is a database with a unique architecture that guarantees the transparency and immutability of any entries in it. From this one wording, half of the big six problems of the online advertising market immediately follow.
But this is only in the first approximation. Only the blockchain is not enough here - the cost of maintaining it must be justified and it makes no sense to keep all the logs of all transactions in it. Transparency is also achieved as a result of payments in the form of tokens and the use of blockchains to control the integrity and history of data on transactions placed in separate repositories - which is extremely important in the case of dealing with gray traffic. Papyrus is built on the blockchain platform and Ethereum smart contracts, a network of state channels and a reliable decentralized data repository. The architecture consists of 4 layers, the components of each of which are developed as open source software.
The Papyrus project is the first of its kind for which a technological architecture has been developed, which allows to circumvent the well-known scalability problems of blockchains. The scalability of the Papyrus project will allow you to quickly and seamlessly grow to any volume that the market requires from it, processing billions of ad impressions on a daily basis. Studying the possibilities of the blockchain, Papyrus specialists were able, on its basis, to design a solution that not only expels the six demons of the advertising market, but also provides additional completely new possibilities :
- Controlled advertising. Users themselves determine what kind of advertising is shown to them and what data they provide to advertisers. That is, almost complete transparency;
- Excellent monetization. Combining monetization through advertising with the economies of decentralized applications, allows developers to create new types of applications, where users get the resources they need due to interactivity, interaction with advertising;
- Advertisers get quality traffic. Yes, in the Papyrus system, advertisers are protected from fraudulent and bots-generated traffic. Everything is fair: only living people, only high-quality and properly working targeting. The money invested in advertising really works;
- Users, in turn, do not receive irrelevant and even malicious advertising. The fact is that attackers have a whole arsenal of tools that allow them to place malicious scripts in advertisements or provide a link to malicious sites. In the new ecosystem this will not happen, such situations are excluded;
- Developers get the opportunity to create and promote decentralized applications that are really needed and carry the benefits of the entire advertising market;
- Finally, advertisers, play shows and users work transparently. The fact is that all data is stored in the blockchain and distributed repositories. This makes it possible to track all operations, excluding fraud in the chain of intermediaries for the purchase of advertising (which is quite a common situation when working with traditional methods);
- And that is not all. The fact is that users are rewarded for sharing (if they wish) their data and interacting with advertising;
- Profit advertisers and owners of resources, placing this ad, increases. Payments pass without problems due to the almost instantaneous transaction;
- Compared to traditional methods, the costs of conducting, administering and controlling advertising campaigns are minimal. Plus, all payments are made in real time.
At the moment, a working prototype of the Papyrus advertising ecosystem is ready and the first real integrations in the advertising market begin.
Papyrus is already launching a pilot integration with AirPush, one of the largest advertising platforms in the world — over 300,000 applications use its SDK. AirPush, being an SSP platform, has been struggling with fraudulent traffic for many years, striving for transparency, protecting the interests of advertisers and publishers, and giving the latter opportunities to monetize the collected user data. The upcoming cooperation will help both companies in researching new technologies.
Also, Papyrus and FraudScore have concluded a strategic partnership agreement - FraudScore will be the first ecosystem-related auditor.
Papurus creates a transparent advertising ecosystem on the blockchain to ensure the absence of fraudulent activity and bot traffic. FraudScore is the largest mobile traffic analyst that has processed more than 257 million applications for mobile applications up to this point.
In early October, Papyrus has already signed a contract with a large blockchain project - the Bancor platform, which is developing and popularizing a protocol - a standard for creating constantly traded Ethereum ERC20 tokens. Thanks to the cooperation with Bancor, users of the Papyrus ecosystem will have access to a token changer - a mechanism for automatic and instant exchange for Ethereum cryptocurrency (ETH) and for tokens of any other projects cooperating with Bancor.
Another strategic partner is BitClave, a decentralized search platform with which the user can find any product or service he needs. Cooperation projects will create a complete system for individual proposals. In this ecosystem, BitClave handles instant search queries when a user comes for a product or service. Collected information about users, if they give their permission, can be provided to advertisers connected to the Papyrus ecosystem, which gives them the opportunity to fine-tune the targeting of their ads using contextual information. Also, BitClave offers will be displayed on Papyrus sites, which will increase their effectiveness. In the classic advertising ecosystem, this mechanism is called commodity remarketing. A distinctive feature is that the user can receive compensation for interacting with relevant, useful ads and offers.
To translate their vision into reality, the Papyrus team entered ICO crowdfunding , which will end on November 2.
CryptoCommunity, blockchain-enthusiasts, users tired of irrelevant advertising and businessmen tormented by overpayments for other people's mistakes and deception will be able to support the idea with voice and ruble by purchasing PPR project tokens on the project website papyrus.global .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/373951/
All Articles