How Blockchain Technology is Shaking Up the Advertising Industry

These days it seems like there’s a new tech scandal every day: privacy breaches by huge tech giants, smartphone apps being exploited to conduct ad fraud, and then there’s the totally normal stuff that users expect to happen every day: Getting tracked by invasive cookies and pixels.

Ad fraud is a very expensive problem that is estimated to cost advertisers over $50 billion per year. Let’s be honest: if you’re paying for ads, you’re being ripped off. This is happening because the system is inherently opaque and advertiser’s money ends up being spent primarily on costly middlemen and secondly on ad fraud – not the real human viewers they wanted to be spending money on. Up until now, this has been the status quo for online advertising, with no one making any big moves to really tackle ad fraud. Until now.

Can Blockchain Fix Digital Advertising Problems?

Adbank is an ad tech startup building a blockchain-based solution to tackle the excessive markups in the advertising industry and the $50 billion ad fraud problem. Using blockchain technology, adbank’s payment protocol provides full transparency of transactions between advertisers and publishers while creating a new cryptocurrency powered ecosystem that detects and reduces fraud at scale.

What About the End User in Digital Advertising?

Recognizing the importance of users in the advertising ecosystem, adbank is now rolling out the first of its kind: an ad-blocking browser extension that rewards users for viewing ads. Sounds impossible, right? It’s pretty ingenious once you hear the way it works. BLADE facilitates the users’ active participation by rewarding them with adbank’s cryptocurrency ADB when they see an ad.

With the inherent transparency of blockchain, adbank is able to detect and mitigate ad fraud, stopping advertisers funds from going to bot traffic. Even better, with BLADE, the ads are published in the users browser rather than the site, so spoof domains and fake bot traffic are no longer a threat to advertisers. Advertisers don’t have to worry about crazy high CPC on high-end sites – they just pay to run a campaign on BLADE and follow the user around in their browser wherever they go.

Users love BLADE too – their data is protected and they get rewarded in ADB for their attention. Adbank didn’t forget the publishers: they get a cut of the advertiser’s ad spend and BLADE automatically collects their rewards. All publishers need to do is log in and claim their rewards.

You can learn more about trying out blade for free here: blade.software.

Ad fraud may seem like an issue just for those in the advertising industry, but the solution may be creating a stable ecosystem between advertisers, publishers, and users. Only when the ecosystem starts to respect users privacy and attention can the advertising ecosystem truly function.