What is Microsponsors?

Welcome to the very first post in a series that will introduce Microsponsors to a general audience.

Microsponsors will:

• Help creators and publishers of all kinds earn money for their work
• Help sponsors connect and transact directly with them
• Provide a transparent, neutral marketplace for them to do business

The general idea is that the monetization model of the Web 2.0 companies that we know so well has been to trap “users” (fellow human beings) in walled gardens that are difficult to escape and ruthlessly exploit their behavior and data to extract advertiser dollars. The result of this has been the stream of increasingly nasty consequences we’ve seen play out in the last few years.

The good news is that there are alot of concerned parties who have been watching, planning, and experimenting with new networks, tools, and ways of relating to one another in virtual spaces. Microsponsors is one of these experiments in a larger movement called “Web 3.0”.

Broadly speaking, the problem set before us is:

• Large-scale privacy violation
• User manipulation and exploitation
• Monopolistic practices on digital platforms
• Broken incentive models that result in fraud and waste

Just one example of broken incentives: 52% of traffic on the web is robots and many of these exist to defraud ad networks. Solving even a fraction of this problem will result in incredible savings.

High-Level Roadmap

To begin to tackle this problem set in its initial phase, Microsponsors will launch as a “Sponsorship Marketplace”. From there, we will offer a new kind of Ad Network with different mechanics and incentives, ones that benefit both sponsors and creators.

So… What do you mean by “Sponsorships”?

If you’ve ever tried to drive audiences to your digital content, then you already know what an ad network is. You pay some money, and an ad network places your advertisement on different websites and charges you based on how many views or clicks the ad gets.

The problem is that there are some nasty flaws in this model, and this is the reason Microsponsors will first focus on a different, earlier model that has remained largely untapped when it comes to monetizing on the web: Sponsorships.

Sponsorships have been around since long before the invention of the internet, and are a throwback to how things were before we were all networked, measured and targeted. For publishers, sponsorships are a great way to be able to provide content for free, to get people involved in a cause, or get ideas out to a select audience. For sponsors, they are a great way to build brand awareness, connect with niche consumers and compete against larger industry players.

Sponsorships eliminate the need to collect personal or behavioral data about the audience, because by definition, we already know what the audience is interested in.

Turn-Key Sponsorships

The pain point with Sponsorships from a publisher or content creator’s point-of-view is that sponsorships are often very hard to get, especially for more niche content that is targeted at a specific kind of audience. And for sponsors, it can be costly and time-consuming to pursue these opportunities one-at-a-time.

Microsponsors’ idea is that we can create an efficient self-service peer-to-peer marketplace where niche creators and publishers can directly find sponsors and media buyers that want to reach their audience.

We will be using the 0x protocol on the Ethereum blockchain to auction sponsorships as ERC-721 tokens (and later, we may switch to ERC-1155 when there is support)… And if you don’t know what any of that means, that’s ok — it really doesn’t matter because our goal is to tuck that all away into a great user experience.

What is important to understand is that blockchain and 0x as an infrastructure have some really interesting and unique features that we’ll discuss later on in this blog series.

In addition to removing the simple incentive for robots to load and click on ads, the purpose of building a Sponsorship marketplace with unique building blocks like this is to offer a solution that not only meets but exceeds current expectations of what is possible with Web 3.0.

You might be pleasantly surprised at what we can do.