The Decentralisation of Google Web Services
It is widely accepted that for the past 20 years Google aka Alphabet has been the dominant centralised provider of web-based digital services and tools such as the world's most popular web search engine, Adsense digital advertising services, geo-location services, mailbox provider, social media provider (discontinued), cloud hosting and smartphone OS & apps provider and others.
However, it is exactly that undisputed domination of Google Web Services that has actually lured several contenders to keep trying to find a strategic advantage, an innovation over Google's weak points such as its privacy-oriented issues in order to raise their own share on the market. Moreover, the antitrust movement that supports the idea of breaking the big tech giants in multiple sub companies in order to stop abusing competition and consumers in a two-faced role and recent internet innovations such as the web3.0, blockchain technology and decentralised systems enabled independent startup companies that managed to raise and hold enough funding to present their own alternative "antitrust" web services to internet users.
For those who want to dive deep into the consequences of the Google monopolistic strategy, you can listen the EverybodyHatesMarketeers podcast with Barry Adams, SEO Consultant of Polemic Digital with title: GOOGLE'S SCARY FUTURE: WHAT EVERY MARKETER SHOULD KNOW back in September 2017.
A very interesting project towards the "Decentralisation of Google Web Services", is the Presearch Search Engine that uses the blockchain technology and decentralised systems in order to built its own search engine to compete with Google's dominant Search Engine, providing at the same time to its users the incentive of the PRE token. Further information about the Presearch Search Engine can be found on my article with title "Presearch - The Decentralized Search Engine powered by the community" that has been published on read.cash and Medium and on the #SearchwithPresearch writing contest articles on Publish0x.
What is AdShares ?
According to a survey published on https://www.t4.ai/ on July 2020 about the Internet Advertising Market Share, Market Size and Industry Growth Drivers, it is estimated that from 2018 to 2023 the Internet Advertising Industry growth is projected to average 13% per year reaching the $518 Billions in revenue by 2023 possibly without taking into consideration the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that caused a rapid digitalisation of the global economy as people started spending more time on their electronic devices both for professional or for recreational reasons.
Therefore, in a an effort to compete with Google AdSense and Facebook Ads centralised digital marketing projects and inspired from Satoshi Nakamoto's Vision, AdShares has been developed as a digital marketing umbrella project that aims to raise its own share on the digital advertising market based on blockchain technology and decentralised systems. According to its founders, the main ambition of AdShares roadmap, is to provide a decentralised digital marketing network to its community through a DAO-style governance after providing (selling) their token to Adshares supporters, which is also the main current trend on the crypto-entrepreneurial world.
The project was founded back in 2017 from 2 Polish blockchain technology researchers and entrepreneurs, Dr. Leszek Rychlewski and Jacek Zemło who both share a common interest about blockchain technology and distributed ledgers. The business model of Adshares is simple and well known to the digital marketing professional community. Advertisers are providing advertising packages through advertising banners and text ads on a 100% decentralised marketplace and approved publishers are welcome to include these advertising packages (in the form of html code) into their "webspace", providing digital exposure of these advertising packages. Moreover, the evolution of Adshares as a decentralised Web3 protocol for the metaverse allows publishers to rent their webspace not only on their website as it is possible today on web 2.0 applications, but also inside web 3.0 applications such as the Metaverse, virtual worlds, blockchain games, online NFT exhibitions and anything else will be available on the near future. For more information, please feel free to visit the Adshare relevant Metaverse-related articles on their Medium Blog.
According to the Adshares website, the platform offers a very attractive set of strategic advantages to both advertisers and publishers not only against the centralised & dominant advertising platforms such as Google Adsense or Facebooks Ads but also over mainstream crypto advertising platforms such as Mellow Ads or other GPT/PTC (Get Paid To / Paid To Click) websites, as follows:
Image Source 1 - Image Source 2
Personally, I have some initial objections over the validity of some these advantages which they would be analysed later. Still, I believe that the main advantage for both the advertisers and the publishers is the sophisticated Adlock Bypass. As a proof, the banners that are being provided on Publish0x through the Adshares are visible to its users even in the presence of Brave Ads Shields. Here is an example of Adshares banner on my Publish0x article with title "The NILLION project launch at the University of Cambridge".
AdShares Tokenomics
The native token of the platform is $ADS, an ERC20 token operating on Ethereum MainNet. Still, the token also offers cross-chain compatibility with several other blockchain networks such as the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) as a BEP20 token and the Polygon as a layer-2 solution for Ethereum MainNet. The $ADS token can be stored on a web-based dedicated wallet and it is used for all the essential transactions of the platform such as Receive, Send among holders but also for providing advertising liquidity on the platform. According to ADS tokenomics, the token is already available for trading on various DeFi platforms such as Uniswap (ERC20), PancakeSwap (BEP20), QuickSwap ({polygon) with the addition of more CeFi and DeFi cryptoexchanges to follow soon. The ADS token has a total supply of 38,758,206 tokens and a circulating Supply of 15,611,757 which is distributed to various locations as follows:
From the above scheme, it is obvious that the native token allocation is significantly wide and interestingly the greatest portion of it (20%) has been allocated to Marketing without being clear what exactly it means. Does it mean Promotional Marketing allocation through a faucet, giveaways, Referral contests, writing contests etc ? Moreover, accumulatively for Marketing (20%), as an Ecosystem Fund (10%), Strategic Treasury (15%) and Business Dev (10%), a significant portion of 55% of the tokenomics is kept as Reserve without being allocated to the community directly.
Finally, it is worthy noted that the Adshares Team & Advisers are provided a significant portion of about 15% i.e. 5,813,730 $ADS (+5% of the early adopters allocation) which it can make them automatically major players of the future DAO-style governance of the platform. In other words, the main whales and decision makers of the governance is the same founding team and advisers who developed the project, sold a 10% portion of it as "Liquidity" to the community in order to make some nice quick money but they are still in control of its governance holding 15%+5% of it on their private wallets and keeping 55% of it as Reserve as it was mentioned above. Therefore, the future ambition of the founders to handle the governance of the project to its community isn't completely valid but it can be well considered at least as inconsistent, unless they would decide to provide the majority of the token allocation to its community and not only 10% of it! It appears to me like a situation where the founder of a company has provided the 10% of the company shares to the stock market for trading, keeping at the same time in collaboration with company's main stakeholders, the managing control of the organisation with the rest 90% of the company shares! Nevertheless, this is another deep subject and again I should clarify that I am not trying to nullify the efforts of the AdShares founding team. As the title says, I am just trying to perform an honest review of the platform and my criticism as I have noted down in several other articles can be considered only as constructive.
The Participation of Cryptomonkey.weebly.com on the decentralised digital advertising marketing
Starting back at 2013, as a veteran fiat fauceteer and a hobbyist crypto-enthusiast, I have been always trying to find free ways to earn some crypto through the cryptofaucets and legit crypto-opportunities that currently exist on the cryptoworld in order to promote the blockchain technology and so far this peculiar hobby has provided me quite a respectful amount of "free" tokens and cryptocoins. In my attempt to collect all these crypto-opportunities that are today available, I have decided over 1,5 year ago, to develop a free website on the weebly platform under the brand name cryptomonkey.weebly.com where I present all these crypto-opportunities and take advantage of their referral system that they provide for their promotion (still without significant success). Yet, I can also see it as my personal contribution to the crypto-community and Satoshi Nakamoto's Vision.
For those who might have the curiosity, my website www.cryptomonkey.weebly.com isn't affiliated or has any relation with CryptomonKeys NFT collection or the Banano project. Our relevance, is just a coincidence as when I secured the available subdomain, I had no idea about their project and possibly they still have no idea of my project either which I have no intention to monetize as a commercial venture. Cryptomonkey.weebly.com was, is and will always be a hobbyist personal crypto-project. As an individual, I have a proper job and career in IT which is my main passion and I never plan to venture and commercialise my cryptohobby for the shake of money, glory, publicity, fame or sex. Therefore, I have also decided to keep my identity on the cryptoworld hidden.
Personally, I find weebly quite an easy platform for web design providing free hosting when using their subdomain and apart from everything else, it is banner, referral links and advertising friendly. So far, I have only included there advertising banners from the crypto-websites that I also use but on the occasion of this writing contest and the promotion of Adshares, I have decided to make an effort and include some banners and ads provided from advertisers on the Adshares platform.
First thing to do was to create an account with the Adshares platform. Interestingly, as it is promised on Adshares strategic advantages above and in contrast with various crypto-projects that I have reviewed in the past that they claim to be decentralised whereas they actually are centralised and regulated, no KYC verification is needed using government documents i.e. passport, driving license or national id for the verification of my identity on the platform. All is needed is an email address and a password. Not even a private blockchain key.
The next step, after verifying my account, it was to register my crypto-website on the platform in order to enable its monetisation through the advertising packages by completed the corresponding form where the user completes the website URL, website name, and choose a category of its content form an exhausting and interesting list and finally specifies the used language. interestingly, I couldn't locate any metaverse opportunities on the dashboard so far but I hope that this is an capability that it would be available in the near future.
The next step is to confirm the application in order to verify my website for advertising monetisation. Unfortunately, AdShares doesn't allow the webhosting of advertisements in websites that are included as a subdomain on a blogging platform such as blogspot, weebly, substack, wordpress etc. Therefore, as cryptomonkey.weebly.com is actually hosted in weebly subdomain for free for the past 1,5 year without paying a single penny for its hosting, it wasn't eligible as an adshares hosting website.
And this is actually the 2nd pitfall of Adshares strategic advantages as it normally states that small advertisers and publishers are also welcome to participate in the decentralised community of digital marketing. However small hobbyists publishers who has chosen not to pay a subscription for obtaining their own domain on the web from a hosting platform, and they have decided to keep their internet presence cost-free by using a sub-domain, are NOT welcome on the decentralised community of Adshares digital marketing.
As a final remark, I really hope that the founding team will eventually take notice of my honest review and will try to correct the above mentioned pitfalls.
***Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading action.***
Publish0x Blockchain stories on [Crypto-monkey] (https://www.publish0x.com/crypto-monkey)
My Censored Blockchain stories on [Read.Cash](https://read.cash/@feax21)
My Cryptoarticles on [LeoFinance](https://leofinance.io/@feax21)
On [Noise.Cash](https://noise.cash/u/feax21)
Social Crypto-networking on [Torum](https://www.torum.com/u/feax21)
Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/feax31)
Follow my [cryptoblog](https://cryptomonkey.weebly.com/)
NFT donations at [n4gay.wam]
