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Blockchain based Verasity gets ready to take on video giant YouTubeDAVID ORMAN
There's an ease to watching videos via mobile our and tablets. The sheer accessibility of watching our favorite shows wherever we are make creating an audience extremely easy, so that online video content not just rivals television but now outstrips it.
With recent announcements showing that teenagers are now watching an hour a day of YouTube, you might think that this is huge news for the advertising industry. A captive audience stuck between ad breaks should be every advertiser's dream yet instead, the industry is tainted by fraud and fake news, something even YouTube recognizes.
The Google-owned video platform has recently announced it will be plowing $25m into hunting out fake news in the hopes of boosting dejected advertisers worldwide. But blockchain based Verasity might just have beat them to the punch.
Announced in January, the platform believes it can save advertisers $19bn alone by simply removing the ad-fraud component from digital losses.
Using new patent-pending proof-of-view (PoV) technology, Verasity essentially verifies all impressions through a pay-to-view and pay-to-earn model, while utilizing a new digital currency.
What’s the current problem?
Advertising campaigns online are suffering. From fake views, bots and diluted traffic thanks to fake news, it all adds up to cost the industry millions each year. In the short term, this results in low traffic or an increase in the wrong target market as consumers find themselves redirected to a website by accident without the intent of purchasing anything.
With each visit reading as an impression, advertisers are having to rely on a complex set of data to understand why visitors are coming to their websites with confusion more than sales often the bottom line.
While YouTube might be the world’s second largest search engine (only surpassed by its parent company Google), it finds itself at a center of fake news and conspiracy videos that carry serious financial implications.
Advertisers, therefore, have identified that the primary issues that are faced with by video platforms, social networks, and media agencies are currently: fake views, bots, and fraudulent views.
So, what’s the solution?
Introducing blockchain to the video market
Verasity launched a soft cap a month ago (a public token sale set at a certain amount that will ensure the project becomes funded). This enabled people to quickly join by merely exchanging their Bitcoin or Ethereum for the project’s new currency, VERA, created using the Ethereum network.
Tellingly, VERA comes from the Latin word for ‘truth,’ something CEO David Orman is incredibly keen on telling. An industry expert himself, he believes there are many wrongs this platform could right. He says, “We’ve all seen first-hand the inefficiencies, imbalance and problems with the current online video landscape. Content shock, poor revenue, high transaction fees, ad-fraud, low revenue for content creators, fake news and poor content discovery. These are just a few of the major issues we are tackling.”
The industry seems to agree; the soft cap has already been reached with the platform due to launch publicly by early 2019.
Earning potential
For the tech-savvy with a burgeoning cryptocurrency wallet, Verasity makes absolute sense. There’s a small token fee for watching something via the platform, but you can earn back VERA tokens by watching adverts. This cyclic way of viewing keeps everything transparent between the advertiser and the customer. Bots are practically eliminated via the blockchain and PoV technology give advertisers security they would never get in the current market.
It also means that for successful broadcasters the earnings potential is immense, with people on the platform already armed with VERA tokens in their wallets, the provision to spend-per-view must be incredibly exciting to new advertisers. And if the commission is less, watch as vloggers start to vote with their feet.
A solution for broadcasters
Despite little publicity so far, the Verasity word has spread, and Orman reveals that content creators, talent managers, and rights holders have been contacting him on a daily basis to understand more about the proposition.
He says,
Mainstream broadcasters through to smaller vloggers are looking at our solution as a new way to eradicate issues caused by ‘fake traffic’ and to help create new, more immediate revenue streams - particularly in reference to how much commission the major online video platforms take from content owner channels. Secondly, the media agency world, recognized as being in a state of disrepair, is developing new blockchain technologies to provide advertisers with more accountable, fairer methods of buying media. Using Blockchain technology to ensure that media investment can provide better transparency, remove the plethora of intermediaries who are taking a piece of the pie; which is reducing brand ROI across digital and programmatic advertising spend.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding. But tellingly Verasity has just announced a partnership with Amazon AWS Activate program, and at the Portfolio Plus level - the most exclusive tier of the program that allows for fast scalability.
Verasity has teamed up with XCHNG, an open Blockchain-based digital advertising ecosystem which promises transparent audience metrics and a dramatic reduction in ad-fraud.
With YouTube’s investment and the rise of platforms such as Verasity, 2019 could be the year digital advertisers have wished for. Clear metrics, reduced ad-fraud, and a transparent market.
The future is almost here.
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