Crypto May End Wars of Online Advertisers Vs. Users

[Visit Adzcoin page totry and test it yourself here.]

In the undeclared war between online advertisers and Internet users, a new dynamic promises to change everything. ADZcoin suggests a radical approach in terms of web content monetization, using its own brand of cryptocurrency to pay costs to content creators.

Ad blockers and advertisements both have become ubiquitous on the internet. There is hardly any website on the internet today that does not have some form of advertising on it. Ad blockers are thus the favoured tool of Internet users that do not want to be distracted by flashing adverts or even the more annoying self playing YouTube or Facebook videos ads.

Of Online Advertising and Adblockers

In 2015, Page Fair published a global report on ad blocking in partnership with Adobe.

The report said that as many as 198 million active adblock users exist in the world and in between Q2 2014- Q2 2015, ad blocking grew by an overwhelming 41% globally. Revenue wise ad blocking had a significant impact as the estimated loss of revenue due to such software was pegged at US$ 21.8 billion.

Ad Blocking tech used globally

There are a number of ad blocking technologies available today. Some of these function as extensions that can be added to browsers of the user, while others take a different approach. Chrome continues to be a hotbed for ad blocking because of the ease with which extensions can be installed in the browser.

There are a number of extensions available for browsers and the most popular among them is Adblock Plus, which has 51% of the global share according to Sourcepoint. Ad block, another ad blocking software has 38% of the market share. Sourcepoint also looked at emerging ad blocking softwares and found that UBlock Origin has grown exponentially in the period between November 2014- August 2015 by a whopping 833%.

The War on Ad blockers

Unfortunately though, not all is rosy for those that choose to use ad blockers. Many websites have decided that they don't want to service content to users who do not watch the adverts of their sponsors. They have a valid point as well because these websites depend on the revenue that they receive from their advertisements.

Washington Post is one such website that actively tracks users who have ad blockers installed and asks them to sign up for an email newsletter or subscribe if they want to continue receiving their content with their ad blockers on. The Atlantic and Forbes are some of the other big names in journalism that have actively taken measures against users of ad blockers.

Although how effective these measures are or if readers notice them is altogether a different story. We asked Tone Vays - Head of Research at BraveNewCoin, an avid user of Ad Block Plus for the last 5 years and he had this to say, “I have never ran across any website that prevented me from access by having the ad-blocker extension installed.”

Are Micropayments a solution?

What if there was an incentive for users to allow some advertisements on their screen in return for some direct or indirect monetary benefits? This could be a game changer as it would eliminate the main grouses of content providers as well as consumers. Under this model viewers are either encouraged to pay a small fee for viewing content or content is monetised by other means.

A novel approach is Brave, which is a new browser by the co-founder of Mozilla, Brendan Eich. This privacy and speed focused browser pays users in Bitcoin to look at non-intrusive advertisements from its own network.

Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave, on the subject of ad blockers and his own browser centric approach says:

“Brave blocks ads when its users micropay, so we don’t ask users to choose us instead of an adblocker — rather, we give users ad revenue share for sites they don’t micropay, and use that to fund payments to their top 10 sites.”

Why Crypto is the ideal micropayment solution

Cryptocurrencies can be a great enabler and a game changer. The completely digital nature of cryptocurrencies means transactions are a cinch. The low transactional fee is another great incentive for content distributors to choose the crypto route.

While Bitcoin is being used by video content distributors like Popchest as a medium to pay their content creators, there are other cryptocurrencies in vogue as well that can be used for this purpose.

We talked with Oleg Khovayako, Emercoin Tech Leader and he told us about EMCLNX, a p2p CPC distributed ads network, which is based on Emercoin. Oleg pitches EMCLNX as a rival to Google Adwords or Bing ads, explaining that “it uses Emercoin as payment currency and payment network, and uses EMC NVS for publishing and distributing ads contracts.”

Turning content monetization on its head with ADZCoin

ADZcoin is a totally radical approach in terms of web content monetization. ADZcoin uses its own brand of cryptocurrency to pay costs to content creators.

ADZcoin will provide its cryptocurrency to users, who can in turn use the currency to compensate their favourite websites for the content they utilise.

The ADZcoin blog explains:

“So the simplistic way of making money, which is slapping some ads on a page and driving traffic to that page, is replaced by a “decentralized quality control system” in which the visitor determines whether or not they think the website creator deserves to earn money or not. This is nothing short of revolutionary and has the power to change the internet as we know it.”

The ADZcoin project has developed such a solution that allows publishers to create high-quality content and build a closer bond with their audience, whilst still receiving an income. Readers get content without intrusive ads and do not overpay during online-shopping.

How it works?

People install the browser extension that notifies them of special discounts and coupons whenever they shop online. As a result, they don’t overpay when making online purchases. When they make a purchase, the ADZcoin team earns an affiliate commission. The commissions are used to buy ADZcoins which will be distributed equally amongst all users who have the browser extension installed. Users can send ADZcoins in one click, similar to a Facebook or Instagram like, to publishers who have ADZcoin-monetization enabled. Publishers can exchange these ADZcoins for fiat currencies.

With the ADZcoin solution, the quality of the publisher’s content and engagement with its audience will determine how much it will earn.

A spokesperson of ADZcoin says to Cointelegraph:

“Now that the system is ready, we will offer website owners the chance to monetize their site by adding one line of code. Next week we'll expand that to forums signatures, youtube videos and wordpress plugin creators (donation feature). This can grow very fast, and we'll make sure the people that adopt ADZ monetization will see financial reward in the form of donations and a bigger audience.”

You can also find out about Adzcoin extenstion here.