How Masmic aims to reimagine online advertising industry
Let’s try to understand this through a hypothetical future scenario in 2020 (figures mentioned below are only to give a broad idea about scale of difference and should not be interpreted as accurate):
A young digital travel startup X has just launched a couple of months back, gained some initial users from among their friends and now has $100 as initial advertising budget and wants to acquire early users online.
X explores available options in online advertising:
i) Google ads seem overly expensive
ii) Travel-based websites are good option to advertise and charge lower than Google ads but due to high use of adblockers, the actual ad visibility is very poor which makes it a poor option
iii) Decides that Facebook is the best available option and decides to advertise to Indonesian audience between the age group 25 to 30. For this targeting, it gets charged around CPM = $5. This means 20,000 ad impressions for a budget of $100.
iv) As users on Facebook are not there to engage with ads and often find them annoying to their experience, click through rates are extremely poor, just around 0.5%. Which means 20k ad impressions result in just 100 clicks avg. And average conversion rate on website is usually 2–5%, which means just 2–5 conversions for spending $100.
Now for an ecommerce website which sells $500+ products with high margins, the above might make economic sense, but not for a travel startup. And so the startup is left with no choice but to spam on available online channels for free, expecting some conversions, which is definitely not a good ROI for the time spent doing it and definitely not sustainable!
Just recently, it came to know about Masmic where it can supposedly get early users. The minimum cost is just 1 MAT which is currently around $5. X feels like taking a chance once because the cost is not too high.
So, it creates a paid $5 bounty with 10 rewards for Indonesian audience and writes a detailed description of its product pitch to the potential users. Now, it doesn’t get any age related targeting options on Masmic yet, but still it decides to give it a try.
It works on the product pitch, starts a bounty and asks users to signup and post a proof along with initial feedback as answer. This gets seen by 2000 Indonesian audience and 400-500 of them decide to click on bounty to engage further. Why such high click through rate? Because that’s what the users are here for; it’s a part of core user experience. 30 participated for the share in 10 rewards, and so there’s a healthy competition between participants as well to write better replies.
The startup gets 30 users for spending $5. There’s better mental engagement from users. User retention for startup obviously depends on whether the product actually is useful, but the startup get 30 educated users which might itself be a good ROI for the startup.
2–5 conversions for $100 vs around 30 conversions for $5. Why? Because user incentives are aligned on Masmic, which were missing on Facebook, and limited rewards ensure healthy competition among participants resulting in better quality engagement.
And how does X use the rest of $95 budget? By using Masmic sometimes for product feedback, user testing, getting product ideas, open innovation, generate awareness, crowdsource creative social media posts or anything creative it can think of which is possible via Q&A.
Now, coming back to how Masmic aims to reinvent adtech -
Problems with current adtech:
i) Facebook and Google dominating the industry resulting in unfair pricing power.
ii) Users annoyed by distractive ads resulting in ad-blockers becoming more and more popular.
iii) Users don’t get anything for mental engagement with ads and platforms like Facebook captures 100% of advertising spend.
iv) Online advertising costs are rising but conversion rates are falling, making it poor ROI (Return on Investment) option for any business’s marketing spend.
v) Hyper-targeting allowed by Facebook severely affects user privacy.
The core problem is that the interests of advertisers and users are not aligned with Facebook. Advertiser’s costs are continuously rising, users get nothing for engaging with ads and Facebook captures 100% revenue generated.
Maybe that’s inevitable for a $500+ billion company wanting to become $600+ billion, which is possible only by further growing revenues. But should this be the only option for other stakeholders — advertisers and users? Not necessarily!
And that’s where Masmic comes in.
With Masmic, the above problems with adtech will be addressed to some extent:
i) Low cost advertising channel for businesses throughout the world and good ROI (return on investment)
ii) Users get the majority portion of bounty/advertising spend on Masmic in the form of incentives for their efforts to engage with the paid question
iii) Incentives only go to the most creative/best participants which attracts good users unlike PTC sites (pay per click) where extremely low incentive is paid to everyone, and thus doesn’t attract a creative audience
iii) Good engagement rate and conversion rate because users get incentivized and don’t consider them as distraction to their experience
iv) A healthy balance between targeting option and user privacy — starting with only country level targeting, and catering to only those businesses for which this option makes sense
Who can use Masmic for posting paid questions?
i) A young startup with a great product looking to acquire early beta users
ii) A new talented youtuber looking for neutral feedback on his new video or get some early subscribers
iii) A global product company looking to generate brand awareness through sponsored Q&A
iv) A marketing manager looking to crowdsource creative social media posts for its company
v) Someone who wants to crowdsource urgent answers to his question, and reliably
vi) A company doing market research to better understand user psychology
vii) An early-stage startup looking for reliable product feedback in a timely manner etc….
