Blockchain & the Crypto Rewards Model  —  The Great Decentralizer

Decentralizing the Economic Models of the Internet with Knowledge

Advertising. Ecommerce. These are the main monetization models of the internet. And as it turns out, many of the largest advertisers are ecommerce retailers.

Advertisers pay to show ads to people on publisher websites and mobile apps. Advertisers and ecommerce retailers use platforms operated by large corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., to get their brands, products, and messages in front of people. These megacorporations make a lot of money controlling these ad tech and ecommerce platforms.

Google’s digital advertising revenue was $73.8 billion of the total $223.7 billion globally in 2017. An estimated $50 billion will be lost to fraud in 2020. Half the monetization of ads on the internet goes to Google or fraud. Think about that.

Much of that advertising happens on websites and apps, but a big chunk happens on the #1 and #2 search engines on the internet: Google, and YouTube (owned by Google).

By their very nature, companies are highly centralized entities, and through policies and selective enforcement, it is conceivable that they could censor content. Now I’m not saying that these companies do censor publisher/user content, but they absolutely could if they wanted to.

Enter blockchain and the crypto rewards model - The Great Decentralizer.

At Knowledge.io, we are decentralizing the economic models of the internet. Knowledge.io as an entity will not earn Google-like revenue. Instead, these revenues are distributed proportionally to the publisher and user participants in our advertising ecosystem. Publishers act like mining pools, and the users are the miners. Knowledge.io receives fees for operating the Q&Ads platform, but most of the revenue is indirectly distributed to the publishers and users based on a structured rewards mechanism. Knowledge.io then deposits a portion of the tokens it earns from advertisers back into the treasury to replenish the pool used for distributing tokens.

A slide from Steve’s presentation at the North American Bitcoin Conference on January 18-19, 2018 in Miami, FL

As users answer Q&A format ads across the Knowledge.io network, and later across the entire internet, they earn tokens, and so do the publisher sites and apps where the ads appear. By creating our own ad buying platform for advertisers, and plugging into the existing programmatic and RTB infrastructures, we are able to make users addressable for retargeting purposes across the entire inventory available on the ad exchanges, with additional details about the user level of knowledge about topics. Throughout this process, Knowledge Scores are computed and written to the Knowledge Score blockchain. This is how publishers and users earn tokens, users based on Knowledge Scores and publishers based on Knowledge Scores generated on their websites or apps.

The result… a decentralized advertising economic model, that over time, creates an environment where the possibility of censorship by a centralized megacorporation controlling the vast supply of advertising is no longer possible.

Additionally, since Knowledge.io scores knowledge, we are able to provide more sophisticated innovation in the targeting methods used by today’s common ad tech platforms. Most use content consumption as a key targeting variable, meaning, they’re focused on what you read or view or interact with on the internet, whereas Knowledge.io focuses on how much (or little) you know about what you read or view or interact with on the internet.

Another benefit of assembling a database of question & answer sets on every topic, taught in every school, at every level of education, in every language, and rewarding educators for gamifying the testing of their students — a massive Q&A search dataset. And the students earn tokens as well, which can be used later on in life for important things like paying for college, buying their first car, or first home. The possibilities are endless, and the Sellers Marketplace can support these major purchase items. Ebay has Ebay Motors, so why not?

How many times when you go to Google do you end up asking it a question? And do you get an answer? Maybe… but you also receive sponsored ads (meaning paid ads that are a revenue source for the publisher, in this case Google) and search results organized by SEO techniques, algorithms, and metatags, etc.

And when the advertisers on our platform, many of whom are ecommerce retailers, offer their products via our Sellers Marketplace, proven experts are able to provide expert ratings, expert reviews, and expert video content to act as influencers on sales. These experts are called Knowledge Stars and the entire community benefits from their proven expertise. The proof exists in their Knowledge Scores on the blockchain.

Many independent publishers, including news sites which are some of the largest publishers on the internet, rely on the monetization through Google and other megacorporations, of their videos and content to provide them with revenue to operate, expand and grow their businesses. Why have a centralized potential for censorship, when we can have an internet free from the possibility of censorship by decentralizing the economic models that power the internet? People want the ability to choose for themselves where they get their content and the ability to choose what they read and see on the internet. We want a free internet, free from the possibility of censorship. Knowledge.io decentralizes the economic models which are the control mechanisms of censorship on the internet.

If you’re interested in learning more, please consider joining our telegram chat for updates on Knowledge.io.