Feb 9
The Alkimi Ad Exchange is live! Here’s what that means…
We have launched our Ad Exchange
Last Friday, we announced that Alkimi’s Ad Exchange was live, serving ads on our own platform Alkimi Labs.
The ad exchange can now run live auctions, log and validate the results and then notarise them on the distributed Ads Ledger. These transactions are viewable via the Ads Explorer.
We are as excited as our community by this launch and wanted to provide a bit more context around this key development milestone.
We caught up with Ben, Chandru and Chorley to explain what the launch means for Alkimi, Publishers, Advertisers and our community.
What this means for Alkimi
Alkimi is now in a position to dramatically scale the size of our ad exchange. We’ve been in conversations with many of the world’s largest publications and we are now ready to expedite the integrations of these publications into Alkimi Exchange.
Increasing the volume of publishers also increases the number of cookies. Think of cookies as potential buyers/subscribers/app installs etc. The increase in absolute cookie volume serves to increase the variety of audiences our buyers will be able to access.
In offering sizeable and varied audiences, we become more attractive to buyers looking to fulfil the targeting requirements whilst accessing more inventory thanks to the very low 3% fees across the Alkimi Ad Exchange.
CEO & Co-Founder Ben Putley
What this means for Publishers & Advertisers
Advertisers and Publishers have not had access to data that has been verified on-chain; in today’s market, this means multiple businesses are having to replicate processes in their respective centralised servers to establish which ads were served where and how much is due to the involved parties.
The benefits of a distributed ledger vs centralised reporting are three-fold:
- Reducing the time taken to receive payment.
- Reducing carbon emissions by limiting unnecessary transactions
- Reducing the need for expensive audits of campaign data & partners
Until now, publishers and advertisers have not had access to data that enables a fair and transparent means of trading ads on the internet.
Access to a transparent and auditable pool of data showing ad traffic, bid responses, ad revenue per page visit, ad viewability, all validated in a decentralised way enables a rich set of reports that can drive the way ads are shown to users.
Publishers are in a position to use this data to analyse bidding strategies of brands to maximise revenue while showing fewer ads. This greatly improves the experience of users on the site, encouraging them to return to the site to consume more content. Reducing the number of ads shown to users and supply chain efficiencies driven by transparent data also contribute towards reducing the carbon footprint involved in ad rendering.
Advertisers also stand to benefit as they are now made aware of the amount of revenue passed on to the publishers. This drives their bidding strategies as a lower bid is equally likely to win the ad auction while resulting in the same (or a higher) ad revenue to the publisher. The amount of money spent on showing an ad to a user greatly reduces and brands can use this optimised strategy to bid higher to reach users who matter to them.
A win-win situation for all, driven by transparent data.
CTO & Co-Founder Chandru Narayana
What this means for Our Community
With the ad exchange live and running on our private network of nodes, we can now look to start including the community to further decentralise the exchange as per our vision.
In the coming months, we will also be inviting $ADS holders to vote on future improvements to the Alkimi Exchange state channel.
Chandru and the team are working tirelessly to create a stable and scalable infrastructure to support the aforementioned activity. With an increase in scale comes the requirement for nodes hosted and maintained by $ADS holders. At which point these validators will be rewarded for notarising live ad transactions to the $ADS explorer.
Users have always been the least loved stakeholder in the value exchange online. They are bombarded with too many intrusive ads, based on their data gathered without their consent. This can be a real turn-off for users and ultimately ruins their enjoyment of the content.
At Alkimi we are determined to bring the user back to the forefront of publishers’ and advertisers’ minds. Our product cuts publishers’ reliance on over exposure as a means to revenue. By giving them more money back, they can show fewer ads, making the ones they do show more effective. The net upside to users is a cleaner, more considered experience, where they can consume content without the frustration that comes with the current paradigm.
COO & Co-Founder Adam Chorely
Check out Chandru’s Technical Deep Dive here 👇
https://alkimiexchange.medium.com/deep-dive-with-chandru-unpacking-transaction-data-7268469f0665
