The unwitting purchase of bot traffic in digital advertising markets defrauds advertisers of over $16+ billion annually.1 Opaque supply chains provide cover for botnet operators who hide behind the black boxes of exchanges and deep within unauditable ad networks.2 Because supply chain entities downstream from the advertiser are generally paid on a cost per mille (“CPM”) basis, their incentive alignment is towards maximizing impressions irrespective of whether those impressions are from human eyeballs or bots. Because botting is cheap and hard to detect, it may even be economically rational for downstream entities to knowingly serve ads to bots.
Ad buyers are increasingly frustrated by having their money stolen.3 While programmatic ad buying is undoubtedly the path forward for quantifying the value of ad buys relative to direct dealing and is the highest growth area of digital advertising, programmatic is, at present, a morass for quantifying efficacy in advertising non-installable goods.4 The behaviors of humans on web pages are easily mimicked by bots and the flagging of bot network signatures is essentially a cat and mouse game.5 This leaves advertisers mostly powerless against the incentive structure of the downstream supply chain.
The adChain Registry is a decentrally-owned domain whitelist being launched as a collaboration of ConsenSys, MetaX, and Data & Marketing Association (DMA), an industry group with 1,400 active members and over 100,000 participants. adToken holders play an incentivized voting game to determine whether an applicant to the registry is a legitimate and reputable publisher or not. Token holders realize no upside for the volume of impressions served to publishers in the registry; rather, they realize upside by seeing the number of publishers applying to and renewing listings in the registry increase. So long as the registry is kept clean of bot traffic, advertisers will want to service bid requests from its registrants. So long as advertisers desire to service bid requests from registrants, registrants will desire to renew their listings and unlisted publishers will desire to apply for listings. Token holders are incentivized to keep fraudulent applicants out of the registry by voting judiciously to maintain this virtuous cycle.
Adtoken white-paper
