As Blockchain technology is getting closer to reality, the adoption across industries is gaining popularity. In this blog, I am presenting another Blockchain use case that is being experimented with in monetizing online engagement and services covering the ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and consumers. In a hyper-connected world leading to heavy consumerization, brands and publishers are creating/publishing events, polls, debates, insights, quizzes, interactive charts aiming to gain higher consumer engagement that leads to services monetization.

With the latest advancements in creating a better user experience with state of the art user interface, artificially intelligent systems collecting data, and analyzing patterns, publishers and brands are in search of a platform for payments that could engage consumers offering cost-efficient and secure transactions creating next-level value in “engagement services” domain.

As we follow the development in this space, Blockchain is sailing through a wave of pilots, with the introduction of cryptocurrencies/tokens for events, advertising, engagement, etc., The Blockchain-enabled platform can establish a new type of relationship, where key players including Consumers, Publishers, and Advertisers gets motivated with proper incentives.

Distributed Ledger Technology with Blockchain ecosystem can offer a platform enabling business models to authenticate users with various services offered via smart contracts and underpinning commissions for such services. Blockchain platforms can deepen engagement easing the online user experience that consumers want and enabling publishers to serve as much advertising as possible to make their business model work.

Let us visualize an online engagement and services monetization framework with Blockchain Decentralized Autonomous Organization (BDAO). A schematic is provided below for ease of understanding.

1. Blockchain (BADO) platform can establish a backbone for online engagement and services offering tokens to facilitate transactions, a distributed ledger technology offering peer-to-peer financial system, smart contract to execute secure transaction and exchange for token exchange and incentives/points redemptions.
2. As a central player, publishers create the engagement & services tokens in conjunction with a crypto player and/or online advertising platform provider. These tokens are made available in the marketplace
3. Clients (brand, agency, or an individual) can buy tokens for fiat and cryptocurrency. Tokens could be also earned via engagements. Publishers decide the price of services and determine token equivalents.
4. Publishers capture the clients’ requests the engagement/services in collaboration with advertisers. Advertisers offer forte of engagement models and services that could include ads, campaigns, surveys, user conversion widgets, events, paid insights, proximity marketing, etc.
5. Advertisers get paid for their services as aggregated and presented by the publishers. Leveraging the BDAO platform, publisher make clients pay tokens for engagement & services in accordance with the current exchange rate of the token in a typical peer-to-peer distributed network
6. Once tokens are received, services (ex: campaign/surveys) get launched per purchased volume of impressions and targeting, all driven by the platform and its campaign/survey management system. The individuals who start their engagement anonymously as decide to register in order to earn tokens and, at some point, to redeem them.
7. Upon completion of service, in this scenario after a campaign/survey completion, an automatic report can be generated and delivered to the client.
8. Similarly, incentives and points can be calculated and converted to token equivalents such that the receiving player gains them in the lifecycle as appropriate. Tokenization can make the point system more materialistic and leverage advanced gamification based on engagement and contributions.

In summary, the Blockchain platform connects services, such as advertising and hyper-tagging to audiences and is essentially serving as a backbone to facilitate many marketplaces and many competing offerings coming from these marketplaces. Using Smart Contracts for such operations makes the platform operation robust and transparent and therefore putting it on the public decentralized ledger is the best approach to grow the business.

With a fast-growing set of Blockchain-based services, applications, and technologies, it makes a lot of business sense to have it utilized not only for immediate monetization opportunities but also for future online engagement and services use cases.

I am available at kishor.akshinthala@gmail.com for further discussions.

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