The Potential of Attention-Based Metrics in the Digital Age

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Verasity

5 min readOct 8, 2019

The world is becoming increasingly digital, and whether you recognize it or not, people are spending vast amounts of time on their phones, tablets, and computers. And when it comes to younger generations, those periods of intermittent digital access, from gaming to social media, can be absurdly lengthy.

Interestingly, parallel to snowballing content consumption, is the explosion of advertising across the web. However, current advertising models are missing something critical — the evolving nature of content consumption.

Advertising revenue models are largely based on molds that are not fit for the contemporary Internet, which is continually changing. Add in the popularity of short-form videos, game streaming services (e.g., Twitch), and a penchant for demanding dynamic digital content, and it is evident that attention-based advertising models present a promising development.

In particular, conventional advertising models rely on fixed impression value assumptions, where time spent viewing an article is valued the same as a click — revealing a bizarre dichotomy between pay-per-click and content consumption that is not compatible with dynamic content.

At Verasity, we understand that content consumption, particularly video content, has evolved significantly. Measuring advertising ROI via past metrics is simply ineffective. As a result, we believe that attention-based infrastructure that is embedded with cryptocurrencies for fueling rewards and incentives are the beginning of a new wave of advertising metrics.

Specifically, the transition to measuring cost-per-hour (CPH), cost-per-minute (CPM), and even cost-per-second (CPS) analysis.

Converging on Shorter Time Frames

Brave Browser broached meaningful discussions on the current online advertising paradigm when it turned Google’s revenue model on its head.

By focusing on attention-based, one-way distribution of rewards to publishers and content creators, Brave was able to simultaneously bypass the speed and privacy issues caused by advertising trackers while also creating a much fairer value distribution — removing Google’s outsized cut in the process.

Naturally, the popularity of Brave is much to the dismay of Google, but it unleashed a wave of speculation on extending the attention-based model into other aspects of online content.

In particular, attention-based reward mechanisms required the advent of micropayments, which were traditionally not practical due to the high costs of their mental accounting barrier. However, cryptocurrencies have changed that proposition altogether. With a distributed infrastructure supplying the reward mechanism, embedded into popular applications, attention-based metrics and products can come to fruition — a vision that is compatible with the ever-smaller time frames in which content is consumed.

TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and other social platforms are all converging on short-form video for a reason — it’s what younger generations demand. Now, we finally have the tools to leverage their predisposition towards digital content.

The Consequences of Attention-Based Cryptocurrencies

Imagine how ineffective pay-per-click or cost-per-conversion (i.e., Facebook Pixel) are going to be in the future for content that users only consume in seconds before they swipe to the next page of their favorite social media app. Facebook Pixel doesn’t even account for time spent viewing something, only that they were converted to the site and eventually into a buyer.

And that doesn’t even take into account the privacy abuses of the tool.

In an era of video consumption, the mechanism for tracking and rewarding behavior on the Internet needs to exist within a much faster time-frame that accounts for attention spent — not solely conversions. Also, it needs to become a native plugin that doesn’t expose user data to third-parties.

In a micropayments-based reward platform like Verasity or Brave, real-time content consumption is converted directly into two forms of value. On the one hand, users can earn VRA tokens on Verasity for playing games or watching videos, and Brave publishers can earn BAT tokens based on how much time users spend viewing their content. On the other hand, websites, streaming platforms, and social media platforms can drive higher traffic and engagement simply with content — not the annoying ads lingering on the sides of web pages waiting to convert users to buyers through poor user-interfaces.

But even more importantly, advertisers will be disincentivized to continue throwing misplaced ads onto content pages anyways because they will be able to extract more refined metrics from such platforms.

For example, Snapchat advertising integrations, which are cleverly embedded in transitions between videos, can leverage attention-based metrics. In Snapchat’s case, users can click through a video advertisement whenever they want, but attention-based mechanisms could both track how long they viewed the advertisement, and even reward them in the process.

For advertisers, that attention metric ostensibly becomes a tool that both incentivizes watching the advertisement and gives them a more accurate insight into users’ content consumption habits. So, rather than relying on a conversion metric where the user clicks the ad, they can glean which ads resonate with specific demographics, through ads that earn users greater rewards (because they’re watching them more) and time-spent viewing them.

Eventually, micropayments could even be distributed to the advertising pipeline too, split between the advertised brand and advertiser. The result is more refined metrics into consumer preferences regarding dynamic content, where cost-analysis is a definitive purview into CPM (e.g., medium length videos like YouTube or Twitch streaming) or CPS — short-form videos like on Snapchat or TikTok.

Everyone wins. Advertisers have better metrics and reduced overhead, while users earn native micropayment rewards and have a better user-experience without misplaced ads based on click conversion models.

We’re only in the very early stages of the transformation to attention-based metrics, but they represent a fundamental shift in advertising that is wholly compatible with an increasingly dynamic age of content consumption.

About Verasity

Verasity is a leading company providing rewarded video player technology to major publishers across the globe. The patent-pending video player enables tokenized rewards (VRA) as well as loyalty schemes within a video player wallet. The unique technology is already available to more than 2 million video publishers with 550 million users and 110 billion monthly views bringing engagement and revenues back to publishers’ sites. Verasity’s attention-based model creates a thriving VRA token economy between viewers, video publishers and advertisers.

Verasity has a partnership with Binance Chain, a blockchain software system developed by Binance in a move that will bring about a new incentivised video economy.

Verasity is the future of online video.

Verasity Products include: VeraWallet: verawallet.tv

Verasity technology is now integrated into the following video players on publishers’ sites: YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, JWPlayer, Brightcove, Kaltura, VideoJS, Flowplayer, and Ooyala which represents over 95% of all the video players utilized.

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