BitClave — Making Advertising Work Better with Blockchain
Imagine if online advertising wasn’t at best annoying and at worst ineffective for basically everyone involved, except advertising agencies and other ‘middlemen’. Enter BitClave, a Silicon Valley-based startup aiming to reshape how online advertising works. The company is creating a decentralized search engine where consumers can connect directly with businesses, be compensated for sharing their personal data, and find optimal offers for products that actually meet their needs.
There’s a problem with online advertising
BitClave is honing in on a two part issue with digital advertising — on the one hand, user behavior and search data is worth billions to companies looking to target their ads, yet the users themselves are never compensated for ‘sharing’ said data.
On the other hand, businesses themselves are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to “middlemen” in order to reach a captive audience for their promotions. Businesses also have little to no guarantee that the traffic they generate on their promotions is genuine. In fact, nearly 50% of all advertising traffic is generated by bots, essentially defeating the entire purpose of advertising. Promotions are largely delivered to those who simply do not care for the product or whose attention is likely focused on something else.
These ineffective measures negatively impact the whole service value chain. As companies are forced to pay increasing amounts to “middlemen”, such as Google and Facebook, a direct consequence is higher price markup that consumers have to pay for products and services. Businesses end up losing money, and consumers end up paying more for less value, creating a lose-lose situation.
BitClave’s Solution — eliminate advertising middlemen
In order to counteract these problems, BitClave proposes a system in which the intermediaries are eliminated and interactions are facilitated by the network itself. Instead of paying any “middlemen”, companies automatically make personalized offers directly to consumers based on their explicit search for goods and services using BitClave’s decentralized search application. In the BitClave ecosystem, consumers have control over their own data and can choose whether to reveal their identity or personal information to retailers as part of their search.
At the same time, retailers respond to these searches with targeted promotions, which consumers are compensated for viewing. The resulting market may incentivize consumers to share some personal information, but this type of sharing is not required for successful search. The ecosystem enables users to control their own privacy preferences, unlike “free” services like Google and Facebook, who often sell user data to brokers. With the BitClave Active Search Ecosystem in place, selling data is a thing of the past, as companies offer promotions to consumers directly, creating an efficient and rich market economy among consumers and retailers.
Use Case: buying a car with BitClave
Here’s a little walk through of how the company’s vision might work. Let’s say you want to buy a new car. Car companies spend millions advertising to you via Google, but they’re offer comes in the form of an irritating banner ad that’s only partially relevant to you. You’ve put in the time researching exactly what you want and you’re ready to put down the money. This time, you go to the BitClave app, search for the car you have in mind. You opt in to share you data with select dealers so they can provide you with the most relevant offers. They then make you offers that truly suit your needs. Whether you take an offer or not, you get compensated in BitClave’s ERC20 token, CAT, from each dealer that made you an offer.
