AdRealm, a digital advertising ecosystem driven by blockchain technology says it has received funding from multiple top tier investment institutions.
According to AdRealm, investors include Jian Sun from JLAB, Bo Shen from Fenbushi Capital, and institutional investors INBlockchain and FUNCITY Capital.
AdRealm has partnered with UPLTV, an AI-driven mobile app monetization optimization service for developers and publishers, in the initial stage. UPLTV has received over $10 million in equity funding from Share Capital, Yi Capital, OuDe Capital, and QianMing Capital, according to a company statement.
MAGNA Intelligence says that global digital ad revenue overtook traditional television ad revenue for the first time in 2017. In 2018, digital ad revenues are expected to grow at CAGR of 13%, reaching $270 billion. Mobile ads account for 63% of the total market share with $147 billion in total revenue and an annual growth rate of 27%, leading overall industry growth. Mobile digital ad revenues are expected to exceed $300 billion by 2022.
Despite the growth and dominance digital advertising, a handful of problems still continue to plague this industry due to the lack of regulation and transparency. These problems include ad fraud, lack of transparent ad spend tracking and data tracking, inconsistent ad spend ROI causing small to medium advertisers to bear high fees of trial, default and opaque service terms leading to continuously increasing advertising cost, and a growing domination of market share by large players. For example, while growing their advertising revenue by over fivefold between 2013 to 2017, Facebook only splits 55% of their ad revenue with publishers. In the digital ad business, large players like Facebook continue to eat up margins from both advertisers and publishers.
In response to the challenges above, AdRealm says it is using blockchain technology to reconstruct the way digital ad revenue is distributed and allocated along the value chain. Given the transparent and open source properties of blockchain, participants are given permission to view data content once agreed to follow chain protocol. Since all transactions are traced and immutable on the chain, this significantly reduces the transaction costs borne by third-party tracking and monitoring providers. Traditional ad platforms and large players will be “unpacked” into micro-services verified on AdRealm (micro-service provider model), eliminating centralized middlemen.
Through coded parameters, AdRealm is able to establish standards for service terms of each provider, such as service term boundaries, revenue model, and data accessibility. As service performance is tracked and quantified, better performing service vendors will be ranked higher and given more service opportunities. All micro-service providers will compete fairly on AdRealm and earn accordingly to their service terms. Advertisers and publishers can choose the services they need and transparently track their spending and earnings across all stages of advertising.
The growth of digital advertising and its complexity of processes and resources make “trust” an inevitable nature of business. Large industry players, based on their size and brand reputation, have relied on this trust for market share. AdRealm, however, is built on the belief that “code is trust” and trust is automated on the chain through decentralized distributed technology. Advertisers and publishers are no longer pressured to opaque service conditions and unjustified results. AdRealm builds a new way for digital advertising transactions by setting new rules of the game that is reinforced by code, eliminating the possibility of any manipulation beyond what is set by the code.
The rise of programmatic and digitization of many processes of advertising lay a strong foundation for AdRealm to evaluate the quality of service through a quantitative way. Through a standardized micro-services provider model, historical records of all service providers will be stored on the chain and are accessible to advertisers and publishers for screening. Advertisers will no longer have to go through the strenuous process of employing DMPs, CDNs, rich media vendors, and other specialized services to reach the end user. Through AdRealm’s smart contract, advertisers can effectively find suitable service providers accordingly to advertising needs.
Home
