Despite the many innovations in the advertising industry that streamlines systems, and even makes possible performance advertising and affiliate marketing, the fact still remains that there is an underlying problem of effectively organizing piles of data and processing accurate and instant payments. Blockchain technology provides solutions to these issues.
A panel discussion in the recently held CoinGeek Conference in Zurich Switzerland expounds on these problems and how blockchain can resolve it. The panel is moderated by lead gaming industry reporter Becky Liggero Fontana, with panelists Frank Vertolli, co-founder and managing partner of advertising agency Net Conversion, Lee-Ann Johnstone, CEO and founder of affiliate marketing agency AffiliateINSIDER, and Luke Rohenaz, CEO and founder of promotion marketplace TonicPow.
“So in between the affiliates and their own tracking ecosystem that sits within their website or their app or however they’re driving traffic, there’s also the fact that the operators are reporting stats as well. And often, there are differences between what gets reported in their affiliate report of the operators network or tracking solution and what the affiliates are actually seeing in their own backend,” Johnstone said.
“Every company is faced with this, from small local organizations to international organizations. They’re faced with so much data from all these systems beyond marketing, just the operations of their business now all produce vast reams of data. And there’s value in there, but the real challenge is organizing it in a way that it’s structured, open and readable so that you can make practical business decisions on a day-in, day-out basis to make the business better, to reach consumers in a more efficient [and] effective way, to really just make the business better. While we’ve made strides, there’s still a lot of work to do,” Vertolli added.
Now, how can blockchain resolve these issues, and why does it have to be the BSV blockchain? Currently, BSV has the only blockchain that is public, distributed and scalable, meaning all stakeholders have access to timestamped data recorded on the blockchain in an immutable manner. Master copies of the data are distributed among all miners or nodes on the network, making it next to impossible to manipulate. With this kind of ledger that provides transparency and integrity to data, it makes it easier to analyze data in a way that provides real value to the advertising industry—leading to a higher level single source of truth.
“In a lot of ways, Bitcoin (BSV) can be thought of as a sort of a neutral database that many companies can all access. And if you structure data in the same way from one company to another, then you can read it and process. And so, there’s a natural fit for data interoperability,” Rohenaz
“But what I think is becoming more possible is larger data sets or more visibility into what happened along that consumer’s journey and how to compensate accordingly for attention, for engagement and for actual conversion. So I think that what [blockchain] does, it kind of creates a higher level single source of truth, which is ubiquitous across all industries. Everyone’s looking for that,” Vertolli pointed out.
The BSV blockchain is also infinitely scalable, allowing for data blocks to store big data, which only increases as the network scales continuously. This then makes it possible for cheap and instant micropayments, the current median fee of which is only at $0.000091 per transaction. And when the Teranode project is released later this year with an increased capacity of over 50,000 transactions per second, the fees are only going to be lowered.
“There are so many people on the planet all creating content. Every single one of those people could potentially learn how to become an affiliate. And then, how do you work with all of those people? The database just keeps growing and growing and growing. So, I think, reporting transparency is something that can really, really be beneficial in the affiliate space… It’s starting to become a very messy ecosystem that we’re all waking in and we need to start looking at solutions to fix when I say that the Internet is broken because we need to find ways to scale with transparency,” Johnstone explained.