Mobile advertising moves to blockchain

Marketers are quite suspicious of blockchain in mobile advertising as the technology is relatively new itself. However, it promises to make the whole world of mobile ads absolutely different: honest, transparent and having no fraud.

The mobile ad market is on a big rise and it is expected that in the US spend will come to over 100 billion dollars by 2020. However, it is only one side of the coin. While marketers are very interested in the area, it has a lot of problems like fraud, unclear pricing policies and revenue distribution as well as some other issues like where the information comes from. It is not the first case where we have seen Blockchain entering the advertising market, but how will it work in the mobile marketing space?

Why mobile marketing is in a twist?

Experienced marketers may name many difficulties they have to overcome daily, but there are 2 key problems true for all working in the sphere of ads.

Fraud

As far as back as 2017, National Association of Advertisers has released statistics, according to which more than 7  billion dollars was paid out on fraudulent traffic. What is even more frustrating is when see it accounts for up to 55-60% of the sum spent on digital advertising.

Methbot is a by-word and a complete disaster for marketers. It is so smart, that can easily simulate human’s behaviour, thus makes clicks, downloads apps, subscribers to newsletters and more, that appears to look natural.

The problem of fraud is worse for desktop ads, however, it is slowly making its way more and more into the mobile ad space as well.

Too overcrowded environment

There are so many parties involved, it is not only ad network, but ad exchanges, DSPs and many others. Due to so many parties being involved the actual publisher driving the traffic only receives a small proportion of the payout.

How does Blockchain come into the picture?

The answer is in idea of approach: the information written can never be changed or deleted and is written on computers of all members. Everything is transparent to all participants of the chain. The information will not disappear even if several computers will be out-of-order. You will need approval of everyone in a chain for a new action.

Blockchain is simple in handling and all types of documents, like contracts, transaction details, information about sales can be easily attached. Thus, we will have a more transparent process, less intermediaries and lower commissions.

Cases of implementation

Some good examples can be found from TechCrunch Startup Alley. In general, the process looks like the following:

App developers and marketers get an opportunity make money from the app without 3rd parties using utility tokens. It is up to users which ad to watch and get tokens for it from advertisers. The tokens can be credited after confirmation only.

Bottom line

Blockchain as well as mobile advertising is on its initial state at the moment. Mobile ads, however, seem to be very promising mainly because users’ attraction is not defocused like in desktop screens. More active implementation of Blockchain has started in 2017 with the help of technical advisory group the IAB. We are expecting this to have an impact on making mobile marketing more transparent and help to reduce fraud over the next few years.


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