As we all know, when it comes to media consumption, advertising is almost always in the forefront. You can't watch a YouTube video, listen to podcasts, or browse your favorite sites on the internet without seeing ads. Advertising is part of the beast that is online (and offline) media. Recently there has been an exodus in centralized platforms like Google & Facebook due to their increasing censorship. Luckily there are some up-and-coming crypto based projects out there that are leading the charge into the future of digital advertising and with the recent partnership with CoinMarketCap.com, the team at Kind Ads are pushing ahead in the pack.

The Kind Ads Mission

The Kind Ads network is a decentralized advertising platform that aims to server the most relevant ads over more effective & natural channels like mobile push notifications, email, and chat. Here is a overview of what the Kind Ads team is looking to accomplish before we dive into how it actually works:

  • Kind Ads will show you more relevant ads through channels like email marketing and push notifications.
  • Users will be able to specify exactly how their data will be used, and be incentivized more to allow access via a tokenized rewards pool.
  • We're allowing publishers to easily sell access to their subscribers directly to advertisers.
  • Advertisers will be able to find the publishers based on subscriber quality and run campaigns with confidence.
  • The tokenized rewards pool is allocated daily to publishers, users AND app partners.

Here is a link to the Kind Ads Whitpaper if you want to follow along with me as I break this down. 

Advertisers, Publishers, & Users Benefit

The whole point of the network is to bring a greater balance to the trifecta of the advertising ecosystem which consists of advertisers, publishers, and users. Advertisers get direct access to a publishers offerings which saves the advertiser on costs. Publishers get to keep more of the revenue they generate instead of handing it over to a middle man. Users don't get flooded with irrelevant advertising in awkward ways & they gain more control over their personal data (a HUGE win in my opinion) all while being about to globally opt-out of the network at anytime. While these three categories make up the core of the Kind Ads ecosystem, the “glue” that holds it together are the App Partners who provide publishers with ad serving technology in various formats like push notifications, email, etc. 

The Subscriber Quality Problem

When you look at the advertising ecosystem, the goal for advertisers is to get exposure/traffic to their product or service. By placing ads on a publishers site (like mine!), they are hoping to connect with that publishers subscriber base. Being a publisher myself, I understand the responsibility I have to my subscribers & followers so I always want to make sure they are seeing relevant content on my site. The problem that arises is that an advertiser has no good way of determining the “quality” of the subscribers that the publisher boasts. With so many “fake” accounts and content producers often “buying” likes, subscribers, followers, etc, it makes it hard for an advertiser to quantify their ROI in these situations which is why you get a ton of plain old banner ads plastered in every inch of the screen. This is where the “Kind Ads Score” comes into play and is a major corner stone of the platform. 

The Kind Ads Score

The Kind Ads Score is a decentralized quality and reputation score for domains and publishers that is derived from several factors like historical campaign effectiveness, Google Analytics, and open/click/conversion rates on direct publisher to subscriber communications. An algorithm on the Kind Ads protocol will use all these factors to give domains a score that helps advertisers to understand the quality and trust of a publishers subscribers. Advertisers can use this trusted domain score to identify and advertise on the highest quality publishers in their niche, so it really is a win-win for all parties.

Kind Tokens & The Reward Pool

The whole ecosystem works off of the Kind Token, which is an Ethereum based ERC-20 token operating on an open-source smart contract. The kind Token has 4 major uses cases:

  • Exchanged by users in order to opt in and out of the Kind Ads Ecosystem
  • Used by advertisers to purchase ads from publishers on the network
  • Used to pay publishers on a daily basis
  • Allocated to the daily reward pool for publishers, users and app providers

This utility token is paramount to the longevity of the project and the way the rewards pool is setup incentives good behavior of all parties involved so they maintain a high quality of interactions. While 75% of all ad dollars will go to the publisher that generated the relevant impression or lead, the remaining 25% will be allocated to a reward pool that benefits users, publishers and app partners. Here is how the reward pool breaks down:

  • 5% of ad dollars will go to consumers based on their Kind Ads Consumer Score
  • 10% of ad dollars will go to app providers based on the ad dollars that flow through their ad
    server
  • 10% of ad dollars will also be paid to publishers – based on their Kind Ads Publisher Score

So as you can see there are rewards for higher quality and interaction so each party is incentivized to maintain a high standard. As a users, you will need to install a Chrome browser plugin to take advantage of the rewards, which is the only true downside that I see to this project as it limits who can participate if they don't use the Chrome browser. Hopefully the team will expand this to include other major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer (ugh!), and Brave Browser. 

A Kind-er Future Is Ahead

I don't like advertising that is awkward and clunky, but I DO have some of it here on my website. I am looking forward to a future where publishers like myself don't have to rely on these antiquated advertising networks that take advantage of everyone while keeping the lion's share of profits. The Kind Ad network is on a good pace to help change that and with their recent partnership with CoinMarketCap they are one step closer to that goal!

‘Stache That Crypto Friends!