We began building AdEx Network as an alternative to the array of problems faced by the advertising industry today.
As global advertising and marketing investments continue to grow exponentially around the world, we see a significant shift in the importance carried by different advertising mediums: while TV has always until now been king for advertisers, it is rapidly being outrun by online & digital channels. Experts forecast that search and social advertising will be accountable for about 67% of ad spend growth by 2020 (source). These two mediums are mostly run by a mere four players: Facebook, Twitter, Google and Oath, however there is a myriad of smaller ad serving providers, who mimic the models of the bigger networks and offer questionable results at a high cost.
In recent months, all of these ad property providers have faced criticism in regard to doctored reporting and selling user data to their partners - and with good reason.
Nonetheless, advertisers continue their complicated relationship with them for lack of an alternative.
The need of an alternative, especially to the smaller providers, is most ostensible now, when online advertising has outspent TV for the first time since the coexistence of the two mediums. In 2018, the global spend on online reached 44.9% compared to 31.2% for TV.
Despite its huge growth, however, the online advertising industry struggles with a lot of issues. The ones that affect it the most are lack of transparency in reporting, a multitude of middlemen, high fees and commissions, ad fraud and violating end users’ privacy. That’s why it's time for an impactful disruption of the online marketing landscape. This is where solutions such as AdEx come in.
Campaign results reporting is a nightmare for every marketer who dares to use more than one advertising platform (say - Google Ads and Facebook ads). Things get even more complicated if an agency is used and/or the marketer implements internal reporting to track results.
Data discrepancies often go beyond the margins of statistical deviations, and networks often explain these mismatches with the variety of KPIs used (e.g. clicks vs. impressions). Many users even report errors in reporting within different tools by the same provider - for example between Google Ads and Google Analytics reports; the reason for this is the different methodology used by Google for tracking website visits and ad server clicks.
In addition to that, all the information that marketers get about their campaigns generally comes from the same source - the ad serving network - and is not objectively verifiable. This means that there is no mechanism to protect marketers and advertisers from losses caused by bugs or even by malicious intent.
In order to avoid this, we are introducing real-time tracking and reporting that is easily accessible by each advertiser or publisher. The reporting data is derived directly from the users to the advertisers and publishers, and this guarantees reporting transparency.
In a traditional setting, an advertiser is charged fees for their use of demand-side platforms (DSPs). The average programmatic commissions are usually within the 10-12% range, however they can go up to 20% or even 30%.
This translates to smaller advertising budgets going to supply-side platforms (SSPs) and publishers.
More often than not, providers and middlemen are open and upfront about the fees they charge, however this is not always the case.
With AdEx, advertisers currently benefit from commission-free advertising. This means that 100% of their advertising budgets go to the actual campaigns - and to publishers. However, small validator fees may be required to cover the computational resources required for running campaign validators.
As a result, publishers get much better revenues, and advertisers spend their budgets much more efficiently.
Unlike other ad serving providers, AdEx gives users full control of their data, and fully protects their privacy.
All of the information that AdEx uses for user targeting is collected through the AdEx AdView into the user’s local storage. This information never leaves the device of the user, and they are able to clear it at any time.
In the future, we will introduce the AdEx Lounge - a user-facing part of AdEx that allows you to see what type of data has the AdView collected about you and modify it.
Once again, it's important to note that all of the targeting data resides in the user's browser and never get sent to anyone as an additional layer of privacy.
The end result of this is minimizing the possibility of user data/metadata sales to third parties; exploiting information about consumer purchasing habits, etc.
This also makes AdEx compliant to GDPR and other similar data protection regulations, unlike other solutions.
There are no minimum thresholds to withdraw, and each individual impression is paid for immediately. As soon as you earn any revenue, it's instantly yours - no need to wait for payouts. We achieve this thanks to blockchain-based payment channels, which allow very cheap, direct micropayments for each impression/click.
All funds, including campaign budgets, are securely locked up on a blockchain-based smart contract - at no point does AdEx (or anyone else) have custody of your funds.
In AdEx, there are no restrictions, neither for publishers, nor for advertisers. You can run any ads, and monetize your website no matter what it is.
However, you can set your own restrictions: for example, you can disallow certain content from being advertised on your website. Or likewise, you can stop your ads from showing on certain websites.
The AdEx protocol is intended mainly for display advertising, however its use is not limited to that. It can be applied to a number of different use cases - for example influencer marketing; content micropayments; affiliate marketing; product placement; and so on.
The revenue model could be CPC, CPM, CPA or time-based ad property rentals. This makes the protocol usable for physical world advertising (billboards, point-of-sale advertising, guerilla installations, etc.) as well.