Decentralizing Ad Servers

Taking on the bigger issues within advertising

Advertising Fraud is a Major Problem

While global programmatic advertising spend only continues to grow every year, reaching $155B in 2021, at the same time, so does advertising fraud, which costs the marketing industry an estimated $51M a day, and is likely to reach $100B in annual costs by 2023.

Ad fraud has gotten so bad that nearly 18% of all internet traffic in the marketing industry can be attributed to nonhuman bots actively engaged in ad fraud. This presents a major issue for brands and advertisers when it comes to optimizing their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Current solutions are focused on ad fraud detection and data analytics, which are valuable tools.

However, these tactics are entirely reliant on having constant access to large amounts of high-quality and transparent advertising campaign data that advertisers and publishers can cross reference.

Unfortunately, as veteran marketers, we have seen that in many ways, the legacy advertising industry is far too siloed and fragmented to effectively combat ad fraud. Furthermore, the incentives for both media agencies and publishers is to use bot traffic to bill more impressions. Even with legacy fraud detection tools like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, the industry continues to bill CPMs that may not be viewable to the audience an advertiser wants to reach.

Creating a Trustless Advertising Ecosystem

We believe in a world in which advertising data can be accessed in a permissionless and transparent manner, creating a shared source of truth as a basis for analyzing and better detecting ad fraud, and optimizing ad performance.

Two of the largest culprits of media waste is the proliferation of fake social accounts and the proliferation of fake content aggregators. We are working with Dr. Augustine Fou, an ad fraud expert, to inform a new way to bring value to the publisher-consumer-brand relationship by creating a tamper-proof record of advertising performance data. We will explore decentralizing other parts of a community-owned ad server, like IPFS for storing data & Ceramic for stateful data while keeping a keen eye on the uptime, performance and adoption of the ad server by Myosin clients.

While often bundled together, Ad servers and DSPs serve different purchases.

DSPs are platforms that allow advertisers to purchase ads across many different ad networks, whereas Ad servers store, manage, and serve ads and ad performance metrics.

For many advertisers, owning and managing their own ad server is cost-prohibitive, whereas subscribing to use someone else's 3PAS means you no longer own your own data. This makes the client reliant on the 3PAS to serve as a good and competent actor.

A vastly oversimplified illustration of how Programmatic Ads are served.

As growth marketing experts and web3 evangelists, our mission is to use the immutable nature of blockchain to enable verifiable impressions from human attention and verifiable website traffic to publishers by partnering with the various web3 tools being developed by marketing technology experts in our industry.

More broadly, as more consumers adopt decentralized identities (DIDs), and we see the adoption of wallet-based web browsing (as opposed to browsing the web using web2 browsers like Google Chrome), we will find more opportunities to bring auditability of online marketing data for brands, consumers and publishers alike. For those who are interested in reading more, Dr. Augustine Fou has written about the need to shift to the fifth internet, which gives a great primer to what needs to change in order for us to put the era of ad fraud behind us.