Opening the adChain Publisher Guidelines for Public Comment
See the guidelines here.
Since going live on the Ethereum Mainnet on April 24, 2018, the Release Candidate of the adChain Publisher Registry has seen 49 publisher domains voted in by adToken (ADT) holders across the community.
And we have already seen a fair bit of controversy!
Facebook was rejected from the Registry on May 6, 2018 and a heated debate ensued as to why. It was even alluded to by Joe Lubin during his closing key note at the Ethereal Summit in New York last month.
Reuters was also rejected from the Registry due to political reasons. It seems the deep divide in American politics can seep its way into any discussion these days.
But the vision for adChain has always been about adToken holders battling it out on the basis of curating the most valuable list of publisher domains, “But of value to who?” That is something that was implied but perhaps understated. The obvious answer is, “of value to the digital advertising industry, and specifically of value to advertisers.”
Do advertisers value Reuters and Facebook? Well, duh, of course they do! So then what is going on?
Through much discussion with adToken community members it has been concluded that the evaluation process regarding how to judge the validity of adChain listings is still unclear. It is not a phenomenon that is new to token curated registries (TCR’s). Civil — a platform for decentralized news rooms, is using a TCR for governance that utilizes a constitution. The constitution will serve as the basis for determining what news rooms will be included or rejected from their TCR.
We have always taken a hands-off approach with respect to mandating to adToken holders about how they should evaluate adChain publisher listings in the Registry. Blockchains and crypto are largely about censorship resistance and circumventing centralized power hierarchy’s. So the last thing we want to do is impose our views as a company onto the adToken community. The adToken community is a diverse, global, disparate group of individuals that all have equal opportunity to voice their opinions and make decisions with regards to the Registry and their adToken.
But, as a company (MetaX) steeped in the digital advertising industry for many years, we thought it might be beneficial to offer up a draft of guidelines for the adToken community to use (or not) to help aid in the process of vetting publisher domains when determining if they should be included or rejected from the Registry.
And so…
The adChain Registry Publisher Guidelines are now open for public comment in a Google doc. We welcome any and all feedback and contributions from the adToken community and digital advertising professionals. You may send all of your suggestions, improvements, or critique to hello@metax.io or join in on the discussion in Reddit, Telegram, Twitter or any of our other social channels.
To reiterate, these guidelines are by no means definitive or authoritative. They can be disregarded or utilized to the discretion of the adToken community. Some may find them useful, others may not, and that is OK. The hope is that these guidelines will be adopted and re-drafted to suit the needs of the broader adToken community. They can be amended as many times as deemed necessary. The end goal is still to curate the best possible list of publisher domains. These guidelines are meant to be a helpful tool for achieving that objective.
Sincerely,
MetaX
