How $80 Billion Adtech industry is going to be disrupted by Blockchain and VR

The transition of advertising industry after the dot com decade:

Advertising has come a long way since the emergence of digital media, from posters to popups, signboards to gif’s, commercials to youtube ads. The industry has grown very big in terms of content reach but nothing concrete has been developed in user personalisation.

Targeted ads have been tried to undercover this segment but it still falls short to deliver the precision of ad deliver as the data points we have over the network is limited. By network I mean the Internet here, world wide web has limited capability to get user insights to deliver user-specific ads not because they are incapable to deliver but because their support system is just one dimensional, i.e you can only have access over what a user clicks on the screen.

But now the time has come for the taking this onto a completely next with the fusion of immersive and emerging technology, AR/VR with Blockchain.

AR/VR provides that 3-dimensional model where a user can be completely tracked and based on every movement on the virtual environment to every interaction with and within the environment.

Let’s say when we talk about digital ads or target specific ads of present what at most can be achieved is trying to analyse a user behaviour by analysing data collection from various sources like search engine, social media profiles, youtube video views, online transactions etc and mapping them all and doing data intelligence over it and developing user behaviour patterns and then targeting the user with content customised according to the psychology. In this use-case what ad-networks are trying to do is to guess the user requirements and liking up to some level of accuracy and give different shots with ads and wait for the conversion. This is the most hardcore limit to which an ad network can go at max. The downside of this is that there are a lot of dependencies over the data sets to be gathered from different sources, a lot of processes are involved to cluster data and it is very costly. This hardcore level stuff can’t be afforded by normal businesses and sticks only to the top fortune 500 companies. The worst part is that even after so much of work the bottom line is that we are still guessing and testing our hypothesis.

In the present advertising, ads come from a virtual and try to interact in the physical world. In the future advertising, ads will remain in virtual world and humans will come to interact with the virtual world.

Now, AR/VR opens up a completely new world and the level to which data can be precise just from a single data source, i.e environment. No more guesses of what the user needs or requires, the user behaviour can be determined here with absolute precision, as the user lives in the environment.

Let us take an use case where a user walks into a library in a virtual world :

Here with complete accuracy data points like how many steps the user took after entering the, the complete projectile of user walkthrough, where he spent how much time, how many books the user gazed at, what the gaze time for each one, which lines on the book cover he spent most time admiring, how many time he touched each book, which sections he spent the most time to see the titles and many more like this can be determined by complete perfection because the user is doing it and everything can be recorded and ads can be customised accordingly. This whole data set coming from a single source makes it cheaper to process, removes dependencies over other sources and can make it utilisable even for the small and medium scale businesses too. Taking advertising to the next level.

Blockchain the problem solver for advertisers and content creators:

Now comes the role of Blockchain in the whole scenario integrating the whole system with blockchain provides the model support for the process and backend transactions to be performed. It can add a lot of value in 2 main functions :

1. Auditability of gaze payments.
2. Provenance of virtual content.

Blockchain will allow to securely store ownership data about content assets in VR and AR (objects, experiences, environments, worlds). Then, embed transactional metadata (linked to telemetry data of the user action that triggered the transaction: gaze) across all micro transactions involving those assets. This information can be made directly available to the advertiser and content owner and cannot be forged. As content is added and remixed in the virtual world, the blockchain creates an indelible audit trail of these changes, enabling long-tail royalty payments to content owners.

Smart contracts in blockchain will provide better hold on the copyright materials and make the system completely piracy free. It can be used to track copyright, particularly relevant use cases for tracking copyright in VR/AR include 3D objects (gaming weapons/ skins, hologram characters/avatars or branded virtual items, for example), music (which is often remixed), and user-generated content (UGC) based on copyrighted material.

A crypto coin can calculate how each asset fragment is consumed and create a micropayment payable to content owners accordingly.

Consider the following example whereby users change a digital asset (in this case, players adding new capabilities to an avatar in a game): When the avatar is originally added to the game, the blockchain generates a unique ‘trackable’ token for that avatar. Although players may purchase the same avatar at first, whenever each player buys different moves for the character, the avatar is then considered altered and unique to that player. If the character earns money, the revenues flow back via the tracking token to the rights holders/creators of the fragments accordingly.

Presently, there is no universal ad-based, ad-driven mechanic for driving content inside VR and AR. And there lies a huge gap yet to be conquered. Gaze coin pty ltd is coming with a product that fixes the main problem of monetizing with VR. Gaze Coin uses the concept of “gaze” to create a business model for VR and AR by creating a unit of exchange between content owners, advertisers and users measured initially by gaze and then, more specifically, through eye tracking. By charging advertisers for the time users spend genuinely engaged, content owners are incentivised to provide the most engaging content. Further, the model rewards users for consuming that content, allowing it to be offered for free.

Gaze coin’s token sale starts from 28th November (11am EST).