With billions of people surfing the internet, online advertising is becoming more and more massive in terms of funds spent on its production and placement. Recent reports suggest that nearly 40% of all marketing budgets account for advertising on the internet, and this share is likely to keep growing.
Nevertheless, this market is facing lots of problems related to dishonest practices, user unwillingness to consume advertising, and centralization of the entire industry.
While there are thousands of advertising networks in the world, most advertisers prefer Google and Facebook due to their massive arrays of user data. This might explain why every now and then people see advertising that refers to things mentioned in some personal conversations.
As users oppose those trends by having ad blockers installed in their browsers and simply ignoring shimmering banners and closing pop up messages without even taking a look at them, advertisers lose billions of dollars on advertising that does not actually reach the intended audiences. With some other dishonest practices such as boosting impressions or counterfeiting user clicks, this number grows even more.
Blockchain technology that is already disrupting finance and is reaching to other industries, has proposed numerous solutions to accommodate to the needs of all parties involved in advertising on the internet, which includes end users. Unfortunately, some of those solutions mostly focus on just one party, like advertisers, while ignoring users. Others just offer too narrow solutions that would work only in chosen industries.
This all may become history as AdEx, an international ad platform, rolls out its solution that offers benefits of blockchains to end users, advertisers, and publishers alike.
Describing the proposed solution, Ivo Georgiev, CEO and co-founder of AdEx, said:
“The solution offered by AdEx seeks to benefit all parties involved in the online advertising ecosystem, which means end users as well as advertisers and publishers, while removing unnecessary and downright risky elements currently associated with centralized infrastructure.”
As opposed to other solutions that focus mainly on the corporate entities that need advertising, AdEx proposes to delegate control over advertising to end users. AdEx incorporates so-called AdEx profile, a specific user area where everyone can specify their preferences and other things that advertisers need to know in order to target their campaigns in a better fashion.
Thanks to that, users will no longer see irrelevant and sometimes silly advertising that has no appeal to them, and advertisers will be sure that they’re promoting their product or services across the proper audience.
However, those solutions don’t set aside problems faced by publishers and advertisers. Smart contracts on Ethereum enabled in the system will make the process of bidding and ad placement completely transparent. Publishers will be aware of the price they have to pay for publishers showing the ad, and the publishers will get automatically paid only after they show said advertisement.
The scalability issues that currently trouble Ethereum caused the AdEx team to seek a backstaired option in order to secure their platform from any problems that may arise once many advertisers and publishers get on board.
For that reason, AdEx may extend to Aeternity blockchain in the future, or use IOTA on top of Ethereum.
Being one of the few universally targeted solutions for the online ad industry, AdEx may actually fulfill its promise and disrupt the industry with blockchain-powered solutions. After all, blockchain is the technology that can bring transparency and security to numerous ecosystem, and advertising is no exception here.
