Web perception has improved in recent years, evolving gradually from the use of services mediated by central authorities to decentralized services ran by individual nodes, resulting in many benefits, in particular better privacy. This new stage of decentralized web is called Web3. As usual in this technology, owning a domain and running a website is likely going to lead to traffic, sometimes when offering services or products through the platform, money can be earned with it, enabling to surely pay for the cost of maintenance of the platform, but what if the website's purpose is not for such service? What if, for instance, the website is only for blogging, tutorials or others hobbies? The cost of the development and maintenance of the website will be entirely at the charge of the owner. To reduce such a price and to fully take advantage of the traffic generated by the website, ads may be added to it. However, proposing spaces for rent in order to add advertisements and generating incomes on owned publishers website is as tricky as looking for spaces for rent on websites generating traffic in order for advertisers to promote contents, because these publishers and advertisers do not know each over and have to go through third parties to realize such operations. These intermediaries, also referred as middlemen, have the role of matching supply and demand, but at what cost? To highlight such cost, independent studies were realized in order to identify intermediaries involved in the supply chain of digital advertisements and their cost, here is what was found by ISBA's transparency study:

• ~7%* to an agency fee: amount charged  for matching supply and demand between advertisers wanting to promote contents and publishers offering digital spaces for rent on their website
• ~8%* to a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) fee: a software system (Software as a Service) created by intermediaries and used by advertisers, by paying a subscription fee, in order to manually manage digital spaces rental
• ~10%* to a demand-side technology fee: encompasses all the tools, included software, involved in the digital ads managing process for advertisers
• ~15%* to an unknown delta fee: with any certainty, this fee may be hidden fees, post-auction bid shading/financing arrangements, foreign currency conversion or other types of factors
• ~8%* to a Sell-Side Platform (SSP) fee: using SSP, publishers can customize digital spaces for rent on their website to various platforms
• ~1%* to a supply-side technology fee: encompasses all the tools, included software, involved in the digital ads showing process for publishers

*of the total price paid by the advertisers

Therefore, according to the study, the percentage spent by the advertisers may be split as follow, leading to around half of what they spent left for the publishers:

Source

Note that the previous data were the source of only one independent study, but among all the search and other independent studies made, it is very likely that publishers may only earn between 50% to 65% (top) of what advertisers spend.

Therefore, in order to free from the middlemen fees and to fully take advantage of Web3 by giving up on centralized advertising, a network named Adshares has been created, so that advertisers and publishers can find themselves on the platform set up to trade directly using blockchain.

How Does Adshares Work?

Adshares is a blockchain-based platform which intends to defragment the current digital advertising landscape so that intermediaries, standing between advertisers wanting to promote contents and publishers offering digital spaces for rent on their website, are sharply reduced, as well as intermediary fees.

For Advertisers

Advertisers use Adshares platform to highlight the content they want to promote at range targeted people at very competitive prices. After joining  Adshares network as an advertiser, funds have to be deposited in the account to launch an ad campaign. Deposit can be made through ADS token, native token of Adshares network, other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and also FIAT. Setting up the campaign is then done by providing entries of various informations about the content to advertise:

• budget selection, e.g. 5 USD/day
• duration, e.g. 11/12/21 4pm upto all budget is used
• device preference, e.g. displaying only on desktop and mobile
• browser decision, e.g. only pay for displaying on Firefox browser
• type of banner wished, e.g. size of a medium rectangle of 300x250
• platform preference, e.g. paying more for Unix OS than Windows OS
• geographical restriction, e.g. displaying the promoted content in Europe only

Once the campaign is launched, data about displayed ads can be collected periodically, every predefined set of time (e.g. every hour), to analyze if the campaign is matching well with what is expected. For that, log of server ads are collected and analyzed and according to the result, automatic payment is sent to the publishers having displayed the ads in the form of one bulk payment.

For Publishers

Adshares platform does not set any criteria of traffic to join the network as a publisher, therefore, any publisher can integrate the program. After joining  Adshares network as a publisher, information about the website to add will be needed:

• website's URL, e.g. your own website
• primary language of the website, e.g. English
• size of an ad unit, e.g. 320x50 Mobile Banner
• category that best match the website, e.g. Crypto
• ad categories exclusion, e.g. not displaying Adult ads
• pop-up/pop-under settings, e.g. activating pops ads enables publishers to make extra profit

Once the informations are fulfilled, code will be generated and has to be placed on the website to begin displaying ads. Reports of payments made by publishers can be analyzed to better understand the needs.

Ads Token

$ADS token is the native token of Adshares network:

This cryptocurrency, available on Ethereum blockchain, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon POS, enables to realize transaction on Adshares network and therefore is used to launch campaigns as advertisers and to receive payments as publishers.

ADS token can directly be bought on Adshares website to fund the advertisement campaign, otherwise it is possible to buy some on the following Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs): Uniswap, Pancakeswap, QuickSwap. The asset is part of a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol, meaning that it can not be mined, but compensation in $ADS can be earned from transaction commission on the blockchain. Moreover, ADS token can be managed with ADS Wallet, free and open-source gateway to join Adshares network through Chrome, Opera, Brave and Firefox. 

Blockchain Transactions

Adshares network uses a fork of the Enterprise Service Chain (ESC) Blockchain to operate transactions with ADS Tokens for ad payments. That way, lots of simple transactions can be processed, on particular, the blockchain is able to peak up to 1.4 million transfers per second. The consensus protocol of the ADS blockchain relies on a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol, making the nodes having the highest ADS balance voting for the hash of the new block minted onto the blockchain. The fees for the transactions are very low, around less than 1% of the amount sent. For instance, this transaction of 455 ADS required only 0.455 ADS fee, which represents 0.1% of the total amount sent. The main purpose of Adshares blockchain is to directly connect advertisers who want to promote content, with publishers who have digital spaces for rent on their website, and all of that is dealt through decentralized transactions where ADS asset is the communication protocol.

Ad block

On the rise these recent years, many users are currently blocking ads with an ad blocker because of finding that too much (irrelevant) ads are shown to them. Most of the time, this is done on computers, but also now tends to be increased on mobile devices. When choosing any other ad network than Adshares, there is no guarantee that ads will be visible to users using ad blocker, whereas, Adshares may help publishers reach those using ad blockers. The decentralization of Adshares ad servers may enable to bypass those ad blockers by changing the configuration of the server address of the ad units' script. That way, more users can be reached.

Metaverse

Open virtual universe where people can interact by chatting, playing games, creating cities, visiting museum, attending concerts and so much more, the metaverse will be the future virtual universe of the actual Internet, but more likely as a 3D version.
In this virtual reality, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) will represent anything of value, such as clothes or weapons for your virtual character, consumables for your virtual dog, properties, tickets to attend concerts, ... That way, virtual assets are tokenized into NFTs, so that in the blockchain-based metaverse they can be easily traded and useful.

It is quite possible that in the future, ads will be more and more added to the metaverse, and Adshares may be one of the leading decentralized ad network enabling advertisers and publishers to find themselves to trade directly using blockchain.

To Sum Up

Among all that has been written, here are the ideas that can be highlighted:

Key points

Here are the major key points of using Adshares:

• open source code
• only need an email to start advertising
• more users of ad blockers can be reached
• advertisers can choose to target specific users
• payment system is autonomously running on blockchain
• publishers can choose the kind of ads to be displayed on their website
• does not require any criteria of traffic to join the network as a publisher
• ADS token price may increase if Adshares has an important role in the metaverse
• fee of decentralized advertising through blockchain transactions are lower than centralized advertisements networks

Useful Links

Be connected with Adshares network:

• Check out Adshares Official Website 
• Join the Adshares advertising/publishing program 
• Follow Adshares on LinkedIn professional network
• Stay tune to the project by following Adshares' Twitter 
• Check out Adshares on Medium to read crypto related posts 
• Have a look at Adshares' papers to have a better understanding of the project 
• Search and explore Adshares' blockchain data through Adshares block explorer
• Read Adshares wiki on how to use their advertising ecosystem to have clearer ideas
• Check out Adshares YouTube Channel and learn more about the project through videos 
• Check out the Adshares English Telegram channel and be involved as a community member 
• Have a look at Adshares open source code on GitHub and help them to develop even better algorithms 

Final Thoughts

On the one hand, digital advertising is one of the best ways for advertisers to promote content and for publishers to monetize their website.
On the other hand, Web perception has improved in recent years, evolving gradually from the use of services mediated by central authorities to decentralized services ran by individual nodes.
And in the middle of it all, there is Adshares, freeing from the middlemen fees and making fully take advantage of Web3 by giving up on centralized advertising, so that advertisers and publishers can find themselves to trade directly using blockchain. Therefore, in the coming years, you may encounter more and more ads displayed by Adshares ad network.

Thank you for having read my post, feel free to share your thoughts and any other feedbacks in the commentary section, particularly if I misled something!