Advertisers advertising their ads using third-party providers, must rely and trust the providers. Here, they cannot be sure if every single impression they pay for, do reach their desired audience.
As more and more ads are shown on the web on both mobile and desktop, the industry is fragmented with new fragments coming up every single day. Advertisers must compete in real-time bidding and publishing in an ecosystem that becomes more and more complicated, less transparent and has the potential for fraud.
Because there are a lot money to be spent on the market, it's no surprise that many people are trying to get benefit by eating each others' pie.
And not to mention, not every player in the game employ honest methods. According to experts, about 20 percent of all digital advertising spending is fraudulent or inaccurate.
When advertisement fraud happens, advertisers pay for impressions more than they need. For example, impressions made by robots or fake users, or bots.
Traditional advertisement systems include many intermediates and lack of transparency within the digital ad buying process. For advertisers that buy a single ad placement on a site, this shouldn't be a big problem. However, if they consider complex programmatic campaigns that range from multiple verticals, audience and demography, this would cost advertisers a significant amount of wasted money.
Another thing about online advertising is that the market is growing rapidly. More than half of 2017's advertisements are digital.
A solution is to use blockchain technology. Using a distributed system, advertisers should be able to audit every ad they have or every impression, and pay only for the right ones.
So no money should be wasted.
The application of blockchain technology is considered as an update of the technological infrastructure in the world with simultaneous improvement in transparency, authentication, and efficiency of the process.
Read: How Blockchain Technology Can Change The Way Modern Businesses Work
One example, is ClearCoin. The startup based in the U.S., has created an Ethereum-based system with a history-proof ledger for publishers. What this means, every transaction adds new information to the system, and advertisers can check if their partners are honest just like they say they were.
ClearCoin works with the supply chain of the $563 billion worth media and advertising market, with ClearCoin (CLR) tokens powering its distributed ledger.
The platform offers a number of options:
- Purchasing capability.
- Generation of income for publishers who have advertising space for sales.
- Security solutions.
- Bargaining-based auction, to ensure the proper economy in the market.
- Policy of users’ privacy and the provision of corresponding security.
- Transparency and accuracy in the history records.
- Implementation of smart contracts, which provide effective and secure purchase of ads.
- Provision of real-time data, essential for determination of further advertising strategy.
The platform already has more than 10,000 registrations, and has partnered up with big publishing networks like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Bing.
Here, the team aims to develop the technology for tracking more than 100,000 impressions every second. And as the first next-generation of advertising platform, ClearCoin wants to connect all involved with blockchain technology and an open API, which supports popular ad formats such as Display, Mobile, Video, Native, Social, Audio, Television, Content, and Search Context.