It’s the start of a new quarter and 2022 already feels like it’s flying by. Verasity and VeraEsports have experienced significant growth during Q1, and we are pleased to report that we have met and exceeded our roadmap goals.
Here, we’re going to take a quick look at our roadmap and how we met our goals during Q1 2022.
We also take a deeper look at the other major milestones that we achieved through Q1, and how they fit into our business goals and strategy. Let’s start by examining our product updates.
Product Updates
During Q1, our product development focus was largely centred around our continued Brightcove integration; with the rollout of several important features for publishers looking to leverage the VeraViews ad-tech stack through the Brightcove ecosystem.
These improvements are designed to make it as easy as possible for enterprises to leverage our solution through Brightcove, and access a range of reporting and analytics features. This is crucial to Verasity’s business needs and growth — because companies running ads using VeraViews generates revenue for Verasity, which we subsequently use to buy back and burn $VRA.
Let’s explore each product roadmap item as they’re listed and discuss how we delivered during Q1 2022.
1. Admin panel for Brightcove publishers
The VeraViews admin panel, shown in the screenshot above, allows publishers to manage their web properties and advertising channels, enable or disable VeraViews at the flick of a switch, set up VeraViews for their ad campaigns, and select the video player used.
Many publishers and brands manage more than one website, and we make it easy for them to aggregate their advertising campaigns together in the VeraViews Dashboard. It takes just a few minutes to set up VeraViews once you’ve chosen to integrate it through the Brightcove Marketplace, with a simple-to-generate plugin code for the Brightcove Player which enables VeraViews. During the setup process, publishers can provide us with Player IDs from Brightcove and generate plugin configurations to easily track VeraViews and ad serve analytics, as we’ll discuss below.
The VeraViews Admin Panel is currently in its first iteration, and available for live use by Brightcove publishers. We are pleased to have made our Q1 2022 deadline on this major milestone for us, which will now enable us to onboard the first VeraViews clients and take marketing and sales collateral to new clients looking to leverage our solution.
Following feedback from initial enterprise users, we will make rolling improvements and add new functionality as required. We are also adding functionality to allow more team members to be added to the Admin Panel, add options for processing payments, and tailoring of publisher profiles.
2. Analytics dashboard for Brightcove publishers
For ad campaigns to be successful, and for publishers to see the power of VeraViews, there has to be detailed ad serve analytics tracking in place.
The Analytics Dashboard sits within the admin panel and shows data such as total impressions, valid impressions (i.e. those impressions considered valid after fraud-prevention through PoV), eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions), and revenue from publisher’s ad campaigns. These analytics are shown for each website URL a client tracks, delineated by player ID.
The VeraViews Analytics Dashboard offers all of the functionality publishers would expect from a market-leading ad tech stack, and we will look to build out public-facing or publisher facing documentation on the Admin Panel and Analytics Dashboard throughout the remainder of 2022.
This will serve two purposes, 1) to enable our enterprise partners to onboard and use the VeraViews ad stack seamlessly, and 2) to give greater visibility to our community on our specific components and their status.
Publishers can also choose the date range to display their analytics and export their data as a .CSV for tracking purposes, which will be a core component of publishers getting paid for valid ads served in a timely manner, one of VeraView’s most important USPs to date.
3. Closed beta with initial Brightcove Customers
As you can see from the information and screenshots shared above, we are now in a position to offer a closed beta with initial Brightcove Customers for the VeraViews ad tech stack.
We are pleased to announce that this beta is live with initial testers, including our own iteration of VeraViews that we utilize for VeraEsports content to stress-test our platform. Our VeraEsports content is now hosted through Brightcove, enabling us to switch on VeraViews and explore the functionality that will be offered to our clients.
This testing period is crucial to refining our ad tech stack for enterprise clients. As you may know, VeraEsports plays a fundamental role in this process, driving traffic through our exclusive tournaments and enabling us to test how VeraViews handles ad-fraud prevention at scale. We explore our VeraEsports user growth in regard to traffic and viewership in more detail below.
4. VeraEsports — Tournament creation flow improvements
VeraEsports has received improvements to tournament creation flow, which now makes it easier for our users to navigate through the platform and host their own Esports tournaments. This is part of our wider strategy at increasing user-generated content and hosting both major and community-led tournaments for a range of Esports titles!
5. VeraWallet — Account transactions history export functionality
Early in Q1, we announced that account transaction history from the VeraWallet could now be easily exported as a .CSV file for simple reporting and integration into services like Koinly.
This feature will help $VRA holders keep track of their staking rewards, examine incoming and outgoing transactions, and manage watch & earn rewards for tax reporting or end-of-year accounts.
6. VeraWallet — Automated KYC / Live Chat Functionality
Automated KYC will continue its roll-out, territory by territory, throughout Q2. We partly swapped the full roll-out of this functionality during Q1 with the roll-out of Live Chat functionality for VeraEsports, which was originally a Q2 roadmap goal.
This was prioritized for the GalAxie Cup live tournament we hosted through Q1 2022. Live chat functionality has undoubtedly been a major contributor to the enormous retention of users with the VeraEsports platform as we describe below.
VeraEsports Updates
In Q1 2022, we hosted the GalAxie Cup 2022 in association with The Gaming Company. This has enabled us to attract and retain more users at VeraEsports, which we discuss in detail below.
We’re continuing to expand the games we offer for broadcast and tournaments on VeraEsports, and we’re in talks with games developers to bring new and exciting content to VeraEsports, including new titles. This will be a rolling milestone through 2022, and a major focus area for Perry, our new Head of VeraEsports.
Other Major Milestones Through Q1 2022
Our roadmap progress is important, but there’s also much more news to shout about during Q1 2022! One of our largest milestones through Q1 2022 was PoV Patent approval in China.
Our Proof of View technology passed an examination by the People’s Republic of China National Intellectual Property Administration — becoming the first ad tech module based on blockchain technology patent approved in China!
The patent application, which will now be published in China, is entitled “System and Method for Proof of View via Blockchain”. PoV passed its assessment on the 5th of January 2022 the result of which can be viewed here in Chinese or English.
On the exchange listings side, we navigated major listings on Huobi Global, Crypto.com (including inclusion in their SuperCharger event), Poloniex, Phemex, and integrated $VRA into the StrikeX wallet.
In early March, we were delighted to welcome Perry Smith as Head of VeraEsports. Perry joined the team to push forward the adoption and growth of our Esports offering, bringing with him a wealth of experience and contacts in the Esports industry.
We also committed to the extension of our staking program through to 2023, at a rate of 18.25%. These changes take effect from today (1st April 2022).
Finally, we resolved our Bithumb listing warning and worked closely with Xangle to ensure our audit disclosures were up to date and reflective of our current milestones.
Social, Marketing, and Communications Milestones in Q1 2022
In Q1 we also reached a number of critical milestones for Verasity’s social media presence, channel growth, and press coverage initiatives. We also grew our communications capabilities, welcoming Elliot Hill as Communications Director in January 2022.
Throughout Q1 2022, we have been consistently covered in leading professional publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Esports Insider, Nasdaq, CoinTelegraph, Yahoo! Finance, The Drum, and many more. This represents a step-change in our media presence and coverage.
As our Communications Director, Elliot Hill has previously shared, this is crucial to ensure the Verasity brand becomes instantly recognisable among industry leaders, and this will continue and grow during the remainder of 2022. We have also done a number of podcasts and have many more planned!
On Verasity.io socials, we reached the major milestone on Twitter of 250k followers and welcomed 10k members to our Partner-status Discord channel. Our Twitter impressions, arguably the most important metric of growth on that platform, continue to grow at a rapid rate, gaining almost 16 million impressions during Q1 2022 (15,790,000 to be exact!) and over 70,000 mentions on Twitter!
As mentioned above, pushing traffic and engagement to VeraEsports is growing in importance as we continue our beta testing phase for VeraViews. This has formed the basis of our tournament broadcast strategy and necessitated Perry Smith’s appointment as Head of Esports to drive adoption forward. However, we are also making improvements to how we retain users within the VeraEsports site.
In Q1 2022, we reduced our bounce rate on VeraEsports by an enormous 65.67%, down to just 25.64% from 74.69% in the previous quarter of Q4 2021. For those who aren’t familiar with bounce rates and their importance, this is the portion of users who leave a website after staying just a few seconds, and a bounce rate between 26–40% is considered excellent by experts.
A high bounce rate is a profoundly negative metric, especially for an entertainment platform, and therefore we are proud that platform improvements have enabled us to reduce our bounce rate considerably and retain users at a rate considered to be above excellent in the marketing industry!
This means that our new features, such as live chat functionality, and the tournaments we have brought to VeraEsports are retaining users at a much higher rate.
Likewise, our VeraEsports average session duration increased by 37.53% in Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021, and the number of sessions per user also increased by 17.59% in Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021 — indicating that our users keep coming back for more!
But, why is this important? Because the more users we get who actually participate and watch tournaments on VeraEsports, the more we can test VeraViews in beta through Brightcove. This gives us access to superior analytics data, which we can take to new clients to prove that VeraViews is a market leader in ad-fraud prevention. It’s a virtuous cycle of more traffic > more B2B users > and more adoption for VeraViews.
On VeraEsports, at the same time, we are also seeing a marked increase in our users from Western geographies, with the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and France all making it into the top 10 countries for visitors to VeraEsports in Q1 2022! All of the above data is taken from our Google Analytics reporting.
What’s Ahead for Q2?
Q2 is set to be similarly as packed as Q1 2022, and our product goals include the live rollout of PoV to real customers through Brightcove on completion of our beta testing, the creation of PoV-enabled smart contracts for NFTs, and the development of our highly-anticipated NFT Marketplace.
We will also launch the VeraCard, enabling direct fiat off-ramps for $VRA, and continue with our improvements across VeraEsports. This includes seeking and welcoming new gaming partners.
On our communications side, we’ll be reiterating our focus on transparency moving forward and holding regular AMAs in Discord and other channels. We will also increase the number of external podcasts we appear on.
Finally, now that the world is opening its doors once more, we will be getting out and about! We have over 10 in-person events on our radar for 2022 and we’ll be attending events in the Esports, ad tech, and blockchain + NFT industry — more details to come.
So, a huge thanks to all our community, developers, and VeraLeaders for closing out a hugely successful quarter for Verasity!
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