The advertising business model powers millions of internet businesses. It one form or the other, it allows blogs like ours run our livelihood. However, from a user’s point of view, ads are a nuisance. Kind Ads wants to change that.
The best user experience you can provide will seldom include showing an advertisement and many marketers and advertisers have spent the good part of the last few years in figuring out less intrusive advertisements.
In line with these efforts comes Kind Ads, a project that set its aim on improving the online advertising industry. The project already completed a massive private round of $20 Million and is taking the crypto niche by a storm.
With a tagline like that, we just had to know how this can be achieved.
The problems
Launched by the Leadchain Foundation, Kind Ads has created a decentralized protocol on the Ethereum blockchain for advertisers and publishers. The need for the platform arises from the following problems –
- Most ads are irrelevant and annoying – Irrelevant ads are fed to user data which is collected with no regard for consent and privacy.
- This is resulting in publishers finding it harder to monetize their traffic – Unless the publisher is selling own products to their subscriber base, the first problem has made audiences interact lesser with ads (hence AdBlocks), resulting in lesser ad revenues for them. Nowadays, the publisher is getting hammered with their revenues cuts.
- Advertisers, on the other hand, cannot leverage the best value out of a publisher’s subscriber base – Certain formats of advertising might work best with a particular kind of audience, but over-reliance on banner ads, and its point 2 all over again. There’s also heavy fees from centralized ad networks.
- New advertising technology has an adoption barrier – Until enough people use a new ad tech product, publishers and advertisers won’t use it at scale.
The solution
At its core, Kind Ads has created a decentralized token economy for advertising which does 2 main things –
- It provides a “trust score” for Publishers. Without going into too much detail, what happens here is that publishers are scored based on past advertisement campaign effectiveness. Now there are many other factors that go into arriving at this score, such as subscriber opt-outs, internal campaigns run by the publishers etc.
- A decentralized network for advertisers to directly request access to a publisher’s subscriber base – given the Kind Ads score, the company can now transact with the publisher in a transparent manner using the blockchain and communicate with their subscriber base directly.
Ask any marketer, being able to directly communicate with a prospective customer is the most effective way of selling. However, it is next to impossible to scale this digitally. With their platform, advertisers can do this to an extent, in a safe and transparent environment.
For publishers, especially those running smaller niches, this is a much more effective way of monetizing their subscriber base. The project also claims that through the KIND tokens, ad revenue will be remitted instantly, as opposed to 30 – 45 day lead time.
If Kind Ads can pull this off, this will really create a win-win situation for everyone involved in the ecosystem. But can they?
The team and advisors
CEO and co-founder Saulo Madeiros has a solid advertising background. He is also the co-founder of NPBR International LTDA, a digital marketing agency that currently helps their clients spend over $100,000,000 dollars a year on marketing.
His NPBR International LTDA co-founder, Rafael Mayrink, also joins the Kind Ads team and the technical brain is Jaime Sánchez, who has spent over a decade at Microsoft, building scalable cloud applications.
The biggest green signal for this already competent leadership team lies in the advisory board. Acclaimed digital marketing guru, Neil Patel is their top advisor and highly involved in the project. Anyone in digital marketing has either referenced Neil Patel’s expert blogs and video or has most certainly used his products Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics.
And as if that’s not enough, the advisory board also has the likes of Saber Aria, CEO of BeyondBlocks, Trevor Koverko, the founder of Polymath, Nadav Dakner owner of a digital marketing firm for Blockchain projects and startups as well as many other huge names in the marketing and publishing industry.
Our Take
One big thing that’s missing from the current information we had access to is the lack of how they are going to tackle ad blockers. Some publishers do force users to deactivate ad block to access content, so that could be a workaround, but it will be interesting to see if the Kind Ads team has any other approach.
Without even looking at this A+ team and stellar advisory board, Kind Ads is definitely onto something. The digital advertising ecosystem is due for a huge overhaul and there’s a great blockchain use case here to facilitate and scale the single most powerful selling technique – direct selling.
This looks like a solid project at face value and we will be looking to see more updates from their team.
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