How does advertising work on the Safe network?

Features
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I’ll give a solution. The technical measure is to give advertisers/advertisements an easy/lazy centralized conduit to operate within a priori. Devs need to make it so easy for them that no one would ever think of cluttering up a safe site with advertisements. The effect is that advertising is completely stripped from the pweb and advertisements are decoupled from the content data that people actually visit a site for. Devil’s in the details, but here’s a few random obvious concepts we can toss around…

tldr;

“Pay the Client” (PtC) rewards integrated with the SAFE browser via a high quality plugin. I’m convinced that if this is done well, it can significantly reduce nuisance click-bait advertising and keep things somewhat under control. The hypothetical plugin provides a simple toggle button that engages a frame where advertisements are shown. The client then begins to earn SAFE coin for as long as the frame is activated, as random adverts tailored to the user’s likes/settings are provided. This coin comes from payments provided by the advertisers indirectly via SAFE. Settings/options specified by the user under the plugin settings tell SAFE which type of products/services they are interested in, and this voluntarily provided data is the only thing advertisers get access to. Arguably, the more data you provide, the more rewards you might receive. From the advertiser’s perspective, they can tag their data chunks as an “advertisement”, and then they would need to pay each time SAFE makes a GET request for the chunk. The PtC reward rate could be dynamic just like farming (PtF) or dev rewards (PtD).

A hypothetical step by step for the advertiser :

  1. Upload the data chunks for an advertisement and tag them with an appropriate “advertisement” data sub-type.
  2. Bind a SAFE account address to those chunks that will fund GET requests made on the data.
  3. Include appropriate metadata to allow for indexing of SEO type actions by SAFE.
  4. Keep the account balance positive or else no adverts will be displayed to the target audience.
  5. Pay for some mutable data chunks that will store the metadata about target audience viewing the chunks.

A hypothetical step by step for the client :

  1. Install the PtC reward plugin.
  2. Enter as much or little demographic/generic information about product and service interests they are comfortable with.
  3. Bind a SAFE account that will receive any generated PtC rewards.
  4. Toggle/activate the advertisement window/frame.
  5. Resize the frame, reward rates could increase/decrease based on pixel count. Presumably the plugin is smart enough to know that the advertisement is visible to an active user.
  6. Surf the Safeness.

A hypothetical behind the scenes look at SAFE operations :

  1. SAFE plugin performs a distributed search or directory/index lookup for advertising content based on the generic/demographic/personal information about project/service interests provided by the client.
  2. SAFE plugin randomly selects one out of the returned search/index results and makes sure it is a valid “advertising” sub-type data chunk that can be rendered in the browser frame.
  3. If the GET request to the advertisement chunk is valid, then the advertiser’s account is charged. For now let’s call what the advertiser pays the generic “Pay the Network” rate (PtN). The PtN rate will likely be a weighted composite of other rates and is only loosely coupled to the PtC rate in the same way the basic PUT and GET costs are only indirectly linked.
  4. When the chunk is successfully displayed in the client’s browser window, SAFE delivers a PtC reward to the client’s SAFE account.
  5. Optional: To flatten the playing field, a portion of the advertiser payment is also given to the safe site that was being visited by the client when they saw the advertisement in the browser frame. This way popular site owners will get implicit advertising rewards without needing to put ads on their sites.

So what does this do for the SAFE Network?

  1. It positions SAFE directly in the middle of the 500+ Billion global digital advertising market.

  2. It implicitly strips advertisements from SAFE site content. Essentially it’s a “carrot” based ad-blocker, rather than a “stick” based ad-blocker. Those who don’t want to see adverts, would just not install the plugin.

  3. It promotes network use, since individuals can earn SAFE coin just be reading/surfing for content and they don’t need to worry about managing a vault.

Are PtC rewards enough of an incentive to completely make SAFE advertisement free? Will it stop specific individuals from embedding specific adverts in their sites?

  1. Probably not. As mentioned earlier, this is the “carrot” approach. However, if the vast majority of advertising can be conducted through the PtC interface, it may make other technological means for blocking non PtC based advertisements more effective.
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