Feature Story: How app users are benefiting from Blockchain Technology
As a smartphone user, you are often spoilt for choices given the thousands of apps available for download on the app store. According to a study published by Statistica, over 94% of users choose to download only free apps, and this trend is clearly strengthening in recent years amidst growing smartphone penetration. As of Q1 2018, less than 6% of users are willing to download paid apps. It should therefore come as no surprise that most app developers would release their app free-of-charge, and look for alternative monetization models.
Smartphone usage has been so prevalent in the developed and developing world that it has become a common sight in any part of a city to see dozens, if not hundreds of people glued to their screens while they have nothing else to do. The average US adult spends 3 hours 35 minutes per day on mobile apps — 15% of the entire day! Depending on the nature of your phone usage, you may have an untapped potential to monetize your usage and consumption on your phone.
While free apps evidently attract a much larger user base, most users forget that app developers rarely develop them out of altruism, with no monetization plan. Free apps typically get to monetize their content through advertisements, in-app purchases and most controversially — monetizing user data, which is often done in a shady manner with much obstructions against user attempts to limit the monetization of their data. As a user, I’m sure you are no stranger to the first two ways free apps monetize. User data such as behavioural data, demographic data, consumption and transactional data are immensely useful to businesses who are looking to looking for certain target audiences to market their products.
Imagine, instead, you as the user getting paid to share content, download an app and share your data. But where does the money come from? In the current model, a recurring theme is the need to reach out to third-parties to gain advertising exposure. A company usually hires a content publisher or marketing firm to publicize its content and market its products, and similarly app developers find third-party sites, in particular social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to market and advertise their app. These third-party intermediaries can be eliminated, creating a fairer ecosystem and transferring their value onto the users themselves.
How can Blockchain Technology help app users?
Currently, as an app user, not only are we not incentivized, more often than not, users end up being the product as their data is being traded and utilized without permission or knowledge about where the data ends up at. However, with the advancement of blockchain technology, decentralization can be realized and app users can interact and work directly with ad and data buyers, circumventing the need of centralized, third party intermediaries that wield a disproportionate amount of power in the data and advertising industries. More importantly, blockchain is able to provide for privacy-centric features guaranteed by design.
In the next section, I would like to highlight three blockchain projects that allows app users to be incentivized. These projects are: Basic Attention Token, LBRY credits and SWIPE.
Basic Attention Token
BAT is split into 2 parts, the Brave browser and the BAT token. The Brave browser is a fast, open source, privacy-focused browser that blocks malvertisements (Malware infected ads), trackers, and contains a ledger system that anonymously captures user attention to accurately reward publishers and users. Brave Browser is available on both the App Store and Google Play store.
BAT is looking to support a decentralized content creation support industry by letting users track the content they consume and allocate BAT tokens (platform’s native token) to deserving content creators. As a user/content creator, you may post quality content and get rewarded fairly.
Libra Credits
LBRY is an open-sourced and decentralized platform for video content sharing. It acts as a protocol that people can build dApps on. As a user, you are rewarded for both content creation and content consumption, in the form of LBRY Credits. Yes, you are rewarded for watching videos and surfing the video channels. Sounds like a dream come true?
As a content creator, you will be in control of your own data, not a third party site like YouTube that takes an enormous middleman cut in the profit margin in exchange for hosting it on its platform. This means the creator gets to set the price in LBRY Credits to download or view their content. Of course, they could offer it for free too.
SWIPE
The Cambridge Analytica data breach that made headlines in early 2018 is still fresh in many of our minds, bringing out data privacy into the limelight. Users demand more control and knowledge of their own data and how it is being traded. SWIPECrypto (SWIPE), a Singapore-based blockchain startup is building a blockchain-based data monetization platform, complete with a privacy and data sharing protocol with governance layers.It focuses on empowering user data privacy and building a data ecosystem where key stakeholders are adequately compensated for their efforts.
SWIPE is creating a Software Development Kit (SDK) that can be integrated by app developers that will link them up to the SWIPE network. With the SDK in place, app developers can now provide data ownership to their users. This SDK does not fundamentally affects the app’s original functions, but provide means to optimize data collection for better monetization, with the caveat of privacy protection. All data collected by SWIPE is aggregated, anonymised and encrypted with the user’s keypass, ensuring privacy of personal identifiable information. Unwilling users retain the option to opt out of the monetization model entirely, completely preventing the sale of their mobile data.
SWIPE will soon be integrated into 15 apps, with a total user database of over 2 million users. To demonstrate the capabilities of the SWIPE SDK, the team has launched Blockpost, a MVP demonstration of their SDK features on the Google Play Store. Blockpost provides the latest crypto news updates straight to the lockscreen, offers a cryptocurrency price and portfolio tracker and access to attractive earndrop/airdrop campaigns launched by projects in partnership with SWIPE.
