Kind Ads Review – Using the Blockchain to Make Ads Better

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Whether you’re an internet publisher or just an everyday user, you probably agree about this: ads are annoying.

For users, too many ads – or ads that are too intrusive – can ruin the browsing experience. The worst ads can even infect your computer with malware. And there’s no good solution – setting up an ad blocker prevents publishers whose content you enjoy from getting paid for their work, but not blocking ads makes your user experience significantly worse.

For publishers, it’s not much better. Unless you’ve got enough time and manpower to find and negotiate direct advertising deals – most publishers don’t – you have to rely on middle-man advertising networks that find and place ads on your site for you. But these networks often take a big chunk out of your earnings, and they may place ads on your site that your customers find annoying, irrelevant, or off-putting.

What’s the solution? Kind Ads, a new blockchain-based advertising solution, has one that’ll sound familiar to crypto enthusiasts: decentralize the market and cut out the middle man.

Kind Ads in a Nutshell

Kind Ads is a blockchain-based advertising protocol that will run on the Ethereum blockchain. It aims to cut out the middle-man and match advertisers and publishing platforms directly, allowing both sides to place better, more effective ads while also giving users a better advertising experience.

It starts with what Kind Ads calls the “Kind Ads Score”, which is a measurement of a particular publisher’s value to advertisers. All sorts of factors including traffic, subscribers, and links to reputable sources are factored into the Kind Ads Score, and it’s automatically adjusted based on the success of Kind Ads advertising campaigns that run on the platform. Publishers will be able to run their own campaigns through Kind Ads so that even publishers without a campaign history can demonstrate their value to advertisers.

Being able to see this score will allow advertisers to quickly and easily find relevant publishers and set up campaigns directly, without going through any advertising network. Because it’s all based on the blockchain, advertisers and publishers can interact transparently, and are protected from fraud or deception by the immutable nature of the blockchain ledger.

The Kind Ads protocol also offers more control to users, giving them the opportunity to control their data or opt out of advertising entirely on sites where Kind Ads runs campaigns. Users that don’t opt-out, however, will be eligible for tokenized rewards, and more active and engaged users will be able to earn more. In some instances, users may even be able to sell themselves as “leads” to advertising firms looking for specific targets.

Payments on the Kind Ads network – to advertisers, publishers, and users alike – happen with the KIND token. The KIND token carries no transaction fees and payments are processed daily, meaning that rather than waiting months to see any returns on their ads, publishers can be paid each day, enabling them to quickly re-invest their returns into content.

The basic idea here is that everybody wins: Advertisers get a transparent, direct way to find relevant publishers and engaged users. Publishers get a way to run premium-rate ads without having to find advertisers or negotiate deals themselves, through a system that rewards users for engaging more with their content and ads. Users get more choice – they can opt out of ads if they’d like, or they can earn rewards for opting in and being more engaged.

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No Fees

One of the biggest downsides of traditional ad networks is that they tend to take a 30% cut of a publisher’s earnings. The Kind Ads protocol works differently, and leaves publishers with a much bigger chunk of their own earnings.

Under the Kind Ads protocol, publishers receive 75% of their campaign earnings, plus an additional 10% based on their Kind Ads Score. This means that the Kind Ads fee is effectively half the fee charged by traditional advertising networks. The remaining 15% of revenue is split between app providers whose servers serve the ads (10%) and a fund for users themselves (5%). That reward for users is also a sort of reward for publishers, of course, since it encourages users to keep consuming their content and clicking ads on their platform.

The KIND token

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The Kind Ads advantage for advertisers.

The Kind Ads ecosystem will be run using the KIND token, an ERC-20 token that’ll be defined by an open-source smart contract. This will be the token used to pay publishers, allocate pool rewards, and it will be the token users exchange to opt in and out of the Kind Ads ecosystem.

A total of 61 million KIND tokens exist. They’re pre-mined (so no mining of additional tokens is possible), and no additional tokens will ever be created.

Platform of the Future?

If there’s one downside to Kind Ads, it’s the downside you usually find with blockchain projects – plenty of this promising project is still confined to the pages of a whitepaper, at least for now. Most of the features described above are part of the Kind Ads roadmap over the next 18 months, but they’re not actually in place now.

That said, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic. For one, Kind Ads has already lined up some partners, and is building integrations for popular services like Subscribers and MailChimp. Its co-foudning duo have experience as the heads of a firm that handles over $100 million in advertising budgets each year, and the company’s CTO brings more than twenty years of tech experience to the table. Kind Ads’ advisory board is also stacked with talent that includes online marketing guru, investor, and entrepreneur Neil Patel, Blockchain World Conferences co-founder and Prime Block Capital partner Saber Aria, and many more.

With advisors of that caliber, there’s definitely a great chance that Kind Ads can achieve its promise and help make internet advertising better for everybody (except for the middle-man).