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Ads can be annoying, it’s no secret.
Browsing your favorite corners of the internet can turn into a mildly infuriating experience when the pages are littered with boring, repetitive ads.
To make matters worse, many of these ads are completely irrelevant and even spammy. It’s one thing being bombarded with ads for products you want, quite another when they’re items you simply don’t care about.
It’s hard to get around. Big platforms like Google and Facebook have a lot of power when it comes to ads, and their revenue is growing all the time.
Using these services comes with a price, and the price is that endless stream of ads one comes across on the internet.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if advertisers could work more closely with users and content publishers to make the experience more pleasant for customers and more profitable for themselves?
It could be possible, but it would require a big overhaul of the current system and a new way of sharing data.
First, let’s check out why ads are so annoying now.
Why are ads so annoying?
Digital advertising is all about data. In the U.S. alone, spending on data is forecast to reach $11.4 billion in 2018, with advertising a big driver for this.
Advertising companies are supposed to use your personal data to target you with the ads. In effect, this would result in you seeing ads for products you actually want to buy. Unfortunately, data sharing is a messy area and it doesn’t always go according to plan.
Many companies buy and sell user data, in the form of email lists for example, and the result is users are mixed up and incorrectly targeted. Hence the heaps of irrelevant ads.
Advertisers also find it hard to directly target their customers. Publishers, who produce the content that generates traffic, rarely have a close relationship with advertisers as there aren’t enough platforms that allow this.
The result is that advertisers are unable to rely on genuinely effective types of advertising that involve real dialogue with customers. Instead, they’re forced to just pump out banner ads and hope for the best. The result is annoyed subscribers and poorly performing ads.
The problem stems from centralization. Big companies like Facebook, Google, and YouTube dominate the advertising industry, making it near impossible for advertisers to build relationships with publishers or their subscribers. In fact, 93% of marketers use Facebook advertising regularly.
This makes it much harder to tailor ads for customers and share data effectively. The solution is to move to a more decentralized model — but how?
Using blockchain to decentralize advertising
Blockchain technology is frequently hailed for its ability to build decentralized networks with no central point and no middlemen. This would be a perfect solution to the problems with ads — it allows us to cut out third-party platforms and focus on real relationships.
One Blockchain project is working to disrupt the online advertising world and it’s called Kind Ads.
Kind Ads raised $20 Million in a private round and has recently finished a long process of onboarding publishers and advertisers and want to change the way online advertising works by building a decentralized blockchain platform using its own tokens as currency.
This way, advertisers can transact with content publishers to gain access to their subscriber base. It allows advertisers to communicate more effectively with their potential customers, and target ads in a way that is less annoying and more profitable.
For example, advertisers will be able to shift from randomly generated banner ads to things like push notifications and chatbots, which have been shown to be far more effective at converting leads into customers. They’re also less annoying and much effective.
Customers, meanwhile, will be able to decide who they want to share data with, by selling their data in exchange for Kind Ads tokens. This gives them more control over the advertisers they interact with. They’ll also be able to decide how much activity they want to see and even opt out of lists they don’t want to be in anymore.
This kind of new, smarter system could change digital marketing forever. It’s a more democratic way of advertising, one where advertisers and their targets have more of a relationship. It’ll make the experience of being online more pleasant for users while taking the power from big third parties and returning it to advertisers and content producers.
The people who generate traffic will be rewarded more fairly, and advertisers will be able to pay less to get their message out.
The goal of Kind Ads is to have better suitable and relevant ads for users, more revenue (no middlemen) for the publisher, and zero fees for advertisers.
Everybody wins.
