April Monthly Update

What an exciting month — BLADE launched!

It’s time for April’s Monthly Update on adbank’s progress towards our 2019 goals.

At the end of 2018 we laid out the priorities for 2019, as well as an update on all that has been accomplished in 2018. You can read all of those updates here.

In the April monthly update we are going to cover:

Monthly outlook and reflection from the CEO

Update on key areas of the business

• Tech
• Team
• Runway
• Marketing / Sales

Our 2019 Goals Progress — OkR progress

Jon (CEO) Outlook:

What an exciting month!

We have been pushing hard for over 1.5 years in focused development to get to the point where BLADE is possible. The adbank network has on-boarded advertisers and serves ads with transparent transactions on the blockchain — and now we are the first to launch a rewards system allowing end users to be rewarded for seeing ads (beating BAT by 1 month — not to mention we automatically reward publishers). I am proud of what the team has been able to accomplish and look forward to taking everything we’ve learned in this first month and improving each and every month moving forward.

Some of the top lessons since the launch of BLADE

• BLADE is working as expected with only manageable bugs.
• Priorities for the next stages of development are identified with no significant surprises.
• Anti-fraud systems were tested and held strong by filtering out fraudulent impressions. KYC verification required before withdrawal has removed the economic incentive for fraud.
• Advertisers are slower than anticipated in adoption, many want more data before they sign on.
• The value of the specific impressions we’re selling to advertisers is unknown and potentially too low.

Key Areas of Business Activity Quick Update:

Tech

• BLADE is working as expected: Congrats to the dev team on rolling out an amazing Chrome extension!
• Priorities for development: A few of the consumer facing updates we have in the short term roadmap are:

Referral link vs referral code

Personal whitelist

Dashboard

• Anti-fraud systems were tested and held strong: Several attacks were detected in April. The team handled them easily and did not cause any impact to service. Fraud detection and mitigation is a huge priority!
• You can see one of the BLADE repositories the team is working on here — BLADE Extension.

Team

No changes to the team

The team is locked and loaded and there are no near future plans for any changes. You can see everyone on the team on the website at adbank.network and you can read about the final re-org in this blog post.

Core team is focusing on execution

This is a busy time for the team! With BLADE live, the tech team is hard at work with small bug fixes, mitigating attacks and ad fraud, as well as building the next iteration of BLADE. Not a moment to rest!

The sales and marketing team are hard at work finding the perfect product market fit. Influencers have proven to be very successful in driving BLADE users. Strategic outreach has proven effective in securing new advertisers.

Financial / Runway

• We are executing on plan in terms of costs and the model continues to push into 2021
• BLADE at 10k installs and $5CPM allows for increased development velocity and more importantly increased paid customer acquisition
• The number of impressions per user are slightly below original estimate
• The value of the impressions continues to be proved out but currently performance campaigns performing below expectation. These performance campaign performances will influence what we can charge advertisers on a CPM basis.

Sales & Marketing

In April, the team was focused on driving users for BLADE. Tactics included outreach to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with other crypto projects (cross promotions). Influencer outreach in languages other than English — Specifically, Youtube channels. And, outreach to specific demographics, like online gaming & gambling — Especially Twitch channels.

What we learned in April is that some influencers desire an affiliate link instead of the affiliate code we launched. We immediately put this into the development schedule and some of our influencers are waiting for the links to be live.

Influencers work really well! With the few tests run this month, we’ve driven significant installs through the use of influencers and the referral program. The biggest being a Portuguese-language Youtube channel based in Brazil. Brazil is now far and above the largest adopter of BLADE! It’s also important to note the quality of the installs — with KYC verification and our anti-fraud mechanisms in place, we can validate that there is a significant reduction in fraud on BLADE!

We also learned that with non cryptocurrency/blockchain enthusiasts there is resistance to “crypto” and the need for KYC. Even though other commonly used platforms like AirBnb require the submission of government ID, there is a resistance to provide this information to “crypto projects” from people not yet in the space. This won’t stop us from achieving 100k installs and this is an opportunity for some educational messaging in the future.

Coverage/Mentions in April:

• Hackernoon: https://hackernoon.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-building-a-portfolio-of-digital-assets-without-investing-a-dime-5409e7260c79
• Gokhshtein magazine: https://twitter.com/gokhshtein/status/1121504207012544516 this will be available at Consensus in May
• Brazilian Youtube videos & a contest: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2WMUPTbxQQ9hXq2_uutspg/videos This was one of the first influencers we booked and Brazil is now the leading country in BLADE users!
• Several organic promotions of personal BLADE referral codes on Instagram and a bounty — people are excited about the referral program!

Upcoming Mentions/Coverage — Tentative and Booked:

• Non-English coin review, article, & contest — launching early May
• Blockchain magazine feature story — TBD
• 5 Youtube sponsored promotions, from 9k to over 300k
• Youtube feature video — 3.7k
• FaceBook live with a large crypto community — TBD

In case you missed it, you can see a roundup of previous media coverage in this blog post. You can see a full list of our partnerships on the Partnership Map.

In April, we had 14 advertisers and over 70 campaigns running on BLADE — a great first month! The sales pipeline has over 20 companies interested in running CPM based campaigns on BLADE and the team is hard at work making sure these campaigns happen.

Progress Against Core Objectives Update:

1. Objective — BLADE adoption — adbank ad block extension that allows only adbank powered ads through, while rewarding you for viewing those ads!

1a. Key Result — #1 ad block/reward extension used by the crypto community. Attracting many users and a dominant presence within the crypto community especially!

April Update — Solid start, we fell short of our stretch goal but saw that the levers we plan to pull (influencers) works really well. We achieved a 65% per week compounding growth rate for users!

2. Objective — Pilots, Pilots, Pilots — Our pipeline has never been more full and we are bringing on additional team members to help handle!

2a. Key Result — Consistent monthly pilots similar to the Austria & Red Bull pilot, growing to several per month

April Update — Similar to the last update there continues to be a shift away from pilots for the sake of blockchain and our team focus has been on BLADE in April.

3. Objective — Utility driven by operating AdNetworks (Signed agreement to bring some of the largest crypto publishers inventory available on IntergalacticAds.com)

3a. Key Result — IntergalacticAds.com and other vertical ad networks #1 or #2 by market share in their verticals.

April Update — ECig media has had 2 strong back to back months up from the trailing 6 month average. Interest in IntergalacticAds through BLADE has increased and the new push in the space around IEO’s presents an opportunity.

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