Web3 Advertising - Flaws and Possible Improvements

Web3 advertising has a few problems, but I believe that if they can be solved it could make the online experience much nicer for users and more productive for advertisers.

I'm going to focus on three main examples, simply because they are where I see 99% of the nominally Web3 ads; Brave, Publish0X and Listnerds. I'm sure there are others I haven't come across.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I think the problems fall into four main types;

1. Most advertising on Web3 sites is still push advertising, not pull advertising.
2. Almost all of the advertising is for crypto-related products or services.
3. Almost all of the advertising is from large companies.
4. With crypto holders also being heavy users of VPN's, Web3 advertising is impossible to localise without the co-operation of the viewer, and most advertising platforms don't even try.

Looking at each of the examples in turn;

• Brave serves up ads in a way which appears to have some respect for privacy, and is relatively discreet about the way it presents them. However, it is targeted at businesses with a budget of at least $10,000 per campaign and is very much a "contact us" operation rather than a user-accessible platform, so out of the reach of small businesses. With the lack of ads I've seen for the last couple of months, I wonder if they are getting enough advertisers to fill the slots available.

• Publish0X serves up ads from Coinzilla and BitMedia. As befits the platform, they are 100% crypto-focused. Sadly, they are also very obtrusive and frequently garish, with bright colours and flashing GIF's. All in all, advertising on Publish0X is totally Web2 in the way it works, and lacks any rewards for ad viewers (although the platform itself has rewards).

• Listnerds is one of our own in-house Hive projects. This is far closer to Web3, where users choose which ads to engage with, and the only one where individuals can effectively advertise. The problem with ListNerds is that in order to make it pull advertising, it relies on the advertisers to build their own mailing lists. So it's not very good at reaching new audiences.

So what is to be done ?

I'll be the first to say that I don't have all the answers ! But I have a strong feeling that Hive could play a key role. Whatever solution is developed needs (somehow !) to solve each of the problems, without falling into the trap of centralisation, and with the ability to reach outside of Hive.

Structure

My feeling is that the solution ought to consist of a developer team plus witnesses. The witnesses would be elected in a similar way to Hive ones, and their main role would be to ensure any advert policies (e.g whether political or adult ads are allowed, etc) are agreed and fairly applied.

A Possible Solution

This is the only bit where some Web2 might be needed. There'd have to be pretty heavy advertising initially to get people to sign up. What they'd be signing up to is a control panel where they can volunteer info on their interests (check box plus "other"), location (down to country or county level only), demographic (if they choose to) etc. The control panel would also let them monitor & withdraw their rewards.

There would be a second control panel for advertisers, where they could create, submit and fund ads. This means it would be accessible to small businesses and individuals, not just corporates. The ability to localise ads based on viewer inputs would also help small businesses and those marketing physical goods.

A bit like Facebook, the advertiser interface would be capable to showing the audience for each ad, based on people who have volunteered interest and other information that suggests it's relevant to them (but I'd be keen to avoid the kind of audiences we see on Facebook where it's pretty much "anyone with a pulse living on planet Earth").

As for how the ads are delivered; some could be by email if viewers have selected it, some could be to Hive front ends, and some could be through external platforms like Brave (which would make the variety of ads seen there far more interesting !)

But I'm going to be controversial and suggest that payment for both ads and rewards should be in one or more of HIVE, HBD, and maybe LEO. There are too many tokens out there already, and using just these three could be a massive use case for our tokens and a boost to getting new users onto Hive.

Sadly, I don't have any coding skill, or the time outside running my actual business to make this happen, but does this sound like a possible solution ? What have I missed ? How can we make advertising useful to both advertisers and viewers ?

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