Meet Zinc: The Blockchain-Powered Digital Ad Startup Where Viewers are Players, Not Products

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by Maria Konash · 5 min read
Meet Zinc: The Blockchain-Powered Digital Ad Startup Where Viewers are Players, Not Products
Photo: ZincProtocol / Twitter

In a digital ad system where end users are treated like commodities, a group of seasoned industry pros have created Zinc – the all-in-one solution geared at benefiting each actor in the online advertising spectrum (including the consumers).

The digital ad sector is extremely uneconomical, and that’s especially surprising, considering how much potential revenue could be generated. In 2020, spending in this sector is poised to reach $335 billion – over 30% of which is projected to be wasted due to inefficient systems and fraud.

What fraud looks like in the digital ad world? Bots, click farms, click spam, and ad stacking are just a few examples of how clicks and views aren’t coming from where they should be coming from: users who are actually meant to see the ads. So many dollars-per-user are uselessly spent, and it’s time for a fix.

Blockchain based advertising protocol Zinc has discovered an innovative formula to help save some of the $100.5 billion that this sector is projected to waste. The team behind this new digital ad transformation has constructed an ecosystem that makes these inefficiencies obsolete by putting consumer in the center of the equation, also benefiting advertisers and ad-networks.

Inviting the End Users to the Party

Especially in the past year, widely-considered to have been sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, consumer culture is driving a backlash against how corporations have collected and sold their customers’ data.

As a collective buyer base, consumers have had enough of firms profiting from the unfair use of their personal information–and, thankfully, small advances that reflect their evolved way of thinking started taking place.

In its int intention to put control over personal data back into the hands of an individual, Zinc has developed an innovative marketplace where the end user–the person consuming advertisements–now has a major say in how their personal information is used. Users maintain full control over their data delivery, being able to see only relevant ads (that they’d prefer to see) and get reimbursed with ZINC tokens.

Advertisers are essentially paying for viewers’ time: video watching, link clocking, landing page navigation, etc. What consumers don’t realize is that their time is worth a lot more than the price at which it’s currently valued, and this new system ensures that user targeting goes in the best direction–not abusing user data in the process.

Hasn’t Blockchain-driven Advertising been Done Already?

In recent years, the cryptocurrency revolution has triggered a whole swatch of small-time startup launches that are hoping to disrupt the digital advertising sector. After all, the industry is riddled with overspending and inefficient user targeting – a system that doesn’t maximize benefits for anyone involved.

There have even been a couple of projects like this that have managed to climb the coin market cap rankings, pushing a lot of hype and getting the investment community (misleadingly) excited about what they can provide.

The problem is that none of these platforms, all aspiring to disrupt the online ad paradigm, have successfully come up with a solution that can realistically be implemented by anyone in the global advertising ecosystem.

Some, for example, require users to use the company’s own native browser–which isn’t very in-touch with the current digital ad consumer.

Other current ad industry-centered crypto projects focus too narrowly–either just on benefiting advertisers and publishers, reducing costs by cutting out intermediaries, or forcing their product adopters to learn an entirely new browser and get the hang of a strange, disjointed user interface.

This is where Zinc saves the day by providing an all-encompassing solution. Users need only download Zinc’s user-friendly mobile wallet app to share their data and receive rewards.

Keep Doing What You’re Doing, Just Do it Better

Unlike what’s currently out there on the blockchain market, Zinc tackles all these disjointed challenges with a single system: one that benefits advertisers, developers, ad networks, and app users alike.

Moreover, the team behind this project is focused on making the transition to their network a seamless process – there is no additional browser, plug-in or any sort of new system that needs to be learned in order to start using Zinc. It’s a product that’s geared toward realistic, simple integration, which is something that the market hasn’t yet churned out (but desperately needs).

And there’s a very good reason why the Zinc team came to the realization that an easily-adaptable B2B/B2C digital ad ecosystem is what this sector needs: a number of the innovators behind this token have their beginnings at ironSource, a highly-successful global ad platform that reaches over 1.5 billion monthly active users (like Sprint and EA Sports users).

The founder of Zinc, Daniel Trachtenberg, was the head of Mobile Fraud Prevention and the Director of the Mobile Data Management Platform at ironSource. It was during his time there that he realized a true fraud-preventing digital ad solution needed to be created — one that harnesses the capability of blockchain technology to streamline a wildly inefficient and wasteful industry.

Peering Into the Not-so-distant Digital Ad Future

With Zinc based on the knowledge and infrastructure of ironSource, the project is bringing the digital ad industry into a blockchain-enriched future where we have more winners and less losers.

It’s a quite perspective project that’s putting consumers’ hands on the levers of the system while giving businesses a way to finally make sure their advertising efforts are being funneled into the most lucrative destinations: relevant viewers.

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