The dispaly Ad industry is the next to be disrupted

The display ad sector has been growing extremely fast over the last few years as companies are trying to access their clients online.

Unfortunately as everyone can attest, the practice has been less than stellar lagging the theory of offering the right advertising to the right audience by a wide margin. Look for news on a new car and car adverts will follow you for months. Visit a place somewhere and lo, it will feel like you never left the place weeks after weeks.

So why is targeting so lousy and ineffective?

A large part of the answer has to do with the other side of the equation. Click factories and platforms willing to count whatever to improve numbers and nurture a nascent field.
 
Online advertising is supposed to be better because targeting is easier and everything is measurable. That would certainly be the case if numbers were reliable. They are not! And the consequences are plain to see.

This may be on the verge of a major evolution if the article below is right. But in the end, right or wrong, it does not matter. Blockchain will eventually transform the sector like so many others by introducing foolproof distributed systems which will improve tremendously the reliability of transactions and allow the potential of data and measurements the become reality.

Read on.  

Display Ad industry next to be disrupted

Published on Zero Hedge, October 1st 2019

Just like everything else that’s being disrupted, now we are looking at the ad serve industry.  First let’s explain what the marketplace concept for online advertising is.  Clients (Called Publishers) want to monetize their website with ads.  Advertisers create ads on the marketplace.  They bid on traffic, which is calculated per click.  This is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing.  The exchange, or the marketplace, allows 2 sides to bid and offer just like a stock exchange would, taking the difference as their fee.  This model was pioneered by Google but now almost every ad platform uses a similar model, including Facebook.

But it’s not so simple, as there is an incentive for profit, there is an incentive for fraud.  When someone believes they can get money for free – here we go.  Click click click money comes.  But it’s not so easy.  Google will block Publishers who have ‘invalid clicks’ if they believe they came from the Publisher themselves or if there was a bot used to “Game” the system.  In fact, According to Click Guardian, $7.2 Billion was lost to click fraud in just 2 years:

    Click fraud is one of the most talked about issues affecting advertisers on Google and other Pay Per Click (PPC) platforms.  According to Click Guardian $7.2 billion was lost to click fraud between 2016 and 2018. That’s a staggering amount that millions of advertisers are losing to fraudsters and click errors.  So what is click fraud? According to Google it is an illegitimate action such as an unintentional click or a click resulting from malicious software.  In fact, Google chooses not to call it click fraud and calls it ‘invalid clicks’ instead. That’s understandable considering the confusion surrounding this topic and the various reasons why some clicks may be legitimate or an error.

So this is an ongoing problem in the industry, and we wanted to lay down the background before mentioning this exciting solution.  A company by the name AdEx has developed an open-source, transparent, and fraud-proof solution for display advertising.  What’s exciting about it is that they pay in real time on the Blockchain, so a click equals a payment.  Real time reporting and settlement means that fraud is complex as it can be spotted immediately.  And this can be done without giving up the users privacy.

Our background in this space is substantial, we started in 2006.  Our group has managed a remote SEO workforce of as many as 600 people, our monthly SEO spend has been well over $50,000 for a single client.   We’ve worked with companies big and small, ranging from car dealerships with multiple rooftops to local restaurants.  Content blogs, ecommerce, and more – they all have the same goal: increase traffic for the lowest possible fees.  The problem:  Google Ads works, but it’s expensive.  There is no way around inflation.

So we are hopeful that by eliminating fraud, providing efficiency, transparency, and a high tech low cost platform – costs of display advertising will decrease.

Display advertising is perhaps the most important business tool for startups or online businesses, due to its comparatively low cost.  Wait, didn’t we just say it’s expensive?  It is when compared with the cost of a cup of coffee, yet it’s still far cheaper than the traditional media which is print, TV, and radio.  Expect to spend millions on a TV ad and if you go with the ‘cheap’ option expect to have your ad displayed at night next to Ginsu infomercials.

The other alternative is SEO, which again is hard and involves hundreds of microtasks such as Meta Tag optimization too many to get into in this article.

The only drawback about AdEx is that it’s still private and in beta, so we will be waiting with bells on as they say, for the grand opening.