Digital marketing and the effect of cryptocurrency
In its current situation, digital marketing happens mostly via third parties. Marketers need help from these third parties to handle advertisements and make transactions. Let’s break it down. There are four major players in the digital marketing industry right now: the user (you), the published (content creators), advertisers (companies trying to promote their goods), and the platform (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) If an advertiser wants to target a specific audience, they’ll look for the right publisher and strike a deal that would let them advertise on their channel.Let’s use YouTube as an example.
Pewdiepie is the biggest personality on YouTube, with over 100 million subscribers. Before watching a video, an ad will usually appear—sometimes hitting the same market as Pewdiepie whether that be games, internet pop culture, etc.
In this case, you’re the user, Pewdiepie is the publisher, the sponsored ad is from the advertiser, and YouTube is the platform.
In this example, the advertiser is selling their product by giving a commission to the publisher—giving the advertiser the power to reach the market of the publisher.
If blockchain were integrated into this process, the system would change dramatically and it would affect many other things as well.
First of all, it would mean more anonymity for users. As made famous by the Facebook incident—Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, went to trial for being accused of selling private data to Cambridge Analytica—there are multiple cases where platforms are using private data without the user’s consent. This data is often used by advertisers to target specific audiences. There were many cases like this but if blockchain were to be integrated, it would protect the users more as data wouldn’t be as public.
Next, having blockchain integrated into the system could incentivize the users to actually watch the advertisements. There could be systems in place to reward users for watching the whole advertisement (but more on this later).
Lastly, the publishers would evenly be compensated for their work. You’d be surprised to know how little publishers actually receive when they allow advertisers to promote a product.
In most cases, the platform can get a little stingy and keep most of the royalties. For example, Pewdiepie works hard every day and has released a single video every day for years now. That’s a lot of hard work and it has paid off in the sense that he has the most popular YouTube channel in the world. It was reported that he made $15 million in 2016 and $12 million in 2017.
Although it’s still a lot of money, imagine if he just got 50 cents per subscriber—with his 100 million subscribers now, he’d make over $50 million USD.
