Below are questions and answers collected from Qchain Telegram group regarding Qchain.co (a blockchain powered digital advertising platform)

Qchain Telegram group https://t.me/qchainplatform

Qchain official website https://qchain.co/

Basic Questions

Question

is the specific reason or development that people will demand qchain?

Wally Xie’s Answers

It’s that advertisers and in-house marketers will use our utility token to participate on the platform.

Question

u mean qchain will work as a bridge between advertises and inhouse marketers right?

Wally Xie’s Answers

advertisers and in-house marketers would be on the same side of the bridge; content publishers would be on the other

Question

so will it be used as a payment for advertisers?

Wally Xie’s Answers

payment for content publishers

Question

anyone can be the host? or rather what are the requirement to become a host on qchain?

Wally Xie’s Answers

Anyone with a computer will be able to be a host agent. Foreseeably, VPS's should bd ok, too. One will not need dedicated server hardware. However, mobile devices will not be able to do hosting.

Question

Why does Qchain being developed using two blockchains Ethereum and NEM?

Roy Zhao's Answers

Many of our core components are blockchain-agnostic, so our applications are not reliant on the existence and strength of a single platform. Additionally, we may integrate easy ways to use our platform with fiat, BTC, or other currencies via exchange integration, to make users' lives easier -- ultimately, we seek to give people options, not limit them.

We don't foresee any major handicaps presented to users by the choice to use two blockchains and two tokens. The off-chain business logic APIs are adaptable, can interface with both Ethereum and NEM blockchains, and there's nothing in principle preventing us from interfacing with whatever other technologies are the most beneficial to our users. Meanwhile, the blockchains record important transaction data that is critical for transparency, all the while improving security and reducing infrastructural overhead.

We are building blockchain components on both NEM and Ethereum because these are the two most prominent and promising platforms for connecting general-purpose applications to public blockchain technology. We plan to give users a variety of options for viewing information such as token unit rates, current market fiat equivalents, and comparisons to other currencies, so they can tailor their experience to what is most comfortable to them.

Qchain vs competitors in adtech blockchain

Question

How do you view competition form adtoken? Any comparsion available? Thank you for your time. I like your project and am investing for sure.

Wally Xie’s Answer

AdToken at this point is a very different product. Their primary feature is their website registry to allow their token holders to vote only “good content websites” into the registry to prevent ad fraud. And otherwise, AdToken is being assimilated into CAT (Consensys Ad Technology), which is trying to build a new DSP, exchange, and really port over all the existing ad tech units (SSP/DMP etc.) onto the ETH blockchain.

Qchain has pivoted, and what we are doing is a bit less ambitious, but we feel is a bit more realistic. We’re pivoting somewhat from our white paper actually (after the ICO, we will be superceding our white paper with a new memo describing our updated platform) and are actually focused on building a direct buy marketplace for sponsored content and native advertising. It’s more on the lines of a collaborative sales platform that allows advertisers, in-house marketers, and content publishers to transact in native ad units and build sponsored content pieces together. With direct buy, we are able to bypass some of the blockchain performance issues, and we would be more trying to tackle the problems of conversion rates and the sales bloat in the sponsored content/native advertising industry.

Question

How do you view competition form adtoken? Any comparsion available?

Wally Xie’s Answer

AdToken at this point is a very different product. Their primary feature is their website registry to allow their token holders to vote only “good content websites” into the registry to prevent ad fraud. And otherwise, AdToken is being assimilated into CAT (Consensys Ad Technology), which is trying to build a new DSP, exchange, and really port over all the existing ad tech units (SSP/DMP etc.) onto the ETH blockchain.

Qchain has pivoted, and what we are doing is a bit less ambitious, but we feel is a bit more realistic. We’re pivoting somewhat from our white paper actually (after the ICO, we will be superceding our white paper with a new memo describing our updated platform) and are actually focused on building a direct buy marketplace for sponsored content and native advertising. It’s more on the lines of a collaborative sales platform that allows advertisers, in-house marketers, and content publishers to transact in native ad units and build sponsored content pieces together. With direct buy, we are able to bypass some of the blockchain performance issues, and we would be more trying to tackle the problems of conversion rates and the sales bloat in the sponsored content/native advertising industry.

Question

Is the only difference between BAT and Qchain is BAT makes you use a specific browser? What's the difference between Qchain and Adchain?

Wally Xie’s Answer (June 2, 2017)

Generally speaking, BAT, AdChain, and Qchain have very different proposed backend structures and monetization implementations for agents in the ecosystem. I will work on this answer steadily, as I want to make sure I do not misrepresent BAT or AdChain's products.

In comparison to BAT, Qchain will not require a browser plugin and will be run in a more traditional model descending from that of Google Adsense in that the transacting of money will occur between the advertiser, publisher, and host agents.

BAT will also directly pay users browsing websites for viewing ads through their mechanism. As part of their investment, advertisers will be directly paying for the attention of the user, and hence, the name of their token.

I am not entirely sure how that model will work. In some ways, it reminds me of people filling out surveys to make money. Will this just drive users to look at every ad, no matter whether the ad is a good one, or a bad one? Also, is this a system that can be easily gamed, as filling out surveys has become?

In comparison to AdChain, Qchain will not have a registry for approved sites. In my humble opinion, requiring an approved registry for sites adds an additional layer of red tape that might not be necessary. AdToken holders will have an approve/reject mechanism for voting on websites to be added or removed from the registry based on quality and legitimacy of content. However, I feel that there is already in-built, capitalist and meritocratic regulation in the ecosystem -- publishers who create good, "legitimate" content will naturally get more views, than say, a typosquatted website with randomly generated gibberish content.

So as of now, the primary motivation for ad fraud, is for publishers to unfairly get more money. If users get paid, I think then we would have a much bigger problem. In AdChain, the regulation of ad fraud falls down to the AdToken holders. In our case, the role of filtering out fraud will be the responsibility of the third party -- the hosting agent.

On the surface, BAT, AdChain, and Qchain all look to serve the monetization of digital advertising and publishing, but underneath the hood, we have a lot of different mechanisms. This is why I am confident there will be room for multiple players in this space.

Question

could you tell me the differences between your project and Adex for example ?

Wally Xie’s Answers

AdEx and our advertising application are both delving into different features. One of AdEx's key differenting features is AdEx Profile to help with ad-targeting, while one of Qchain's features is our inclusion of the "host" agent in the traditional three-agent ecosystem. Pools of hosts help with the serving of ads on publishers' websites for scalability benefits, and also with verification and confirmation of CPI/CPC/CPA actions for security benefits. In the future, it seems like AdEx will tilt more towards programmatic advertising, whereas the focus at Qchain is to build a platform for marketing, advertising, and CRM. Qchain is also moving forward with our paid survey application you can read about, and we will also be announcing one more application under our umbrella to incorporate into our platform. I think AdEx and Qchain will turn out to be quite different projects down the line.

Answers from Ivo Georgiev [AdEx]

in our case we skip that, and rely on the publisher to do the hosting. This has advantages and disadvantages to Qchain's approach. they're simply different approaches.

We also do some specific things in targeting, for example keeping all the targeting info browser-side only in localStorage, which will allow for the AdEx Profile (user control of the data)

Other Questions

Question

I've a suggestion - Has the team looked into GDPR and the potential implications of GDPR on the adtech space? If so, it'd be great exposure to publish a blog post on it - Shows forward thinking. When GDPR kicks in in May or so next year there'll be a lot of issues for just about every company that does marketing or digital advertising - Even more so for a platform that powers it.

Wally Xie’s Answers

We are very aware of GPDR. I touch upon it in the white paper, actually. GPDR heavily affects the tracking tools used for display advertising. This is actually one of the reasons why the industry is moving from display to native advertising and sponsored content. There are other changes that make the fingerprinting and tracking used for targeted display advertising difficult, which includes Safari's upcoming changes for cookie storage. We consciously made the decision to pivot towards native advertising and sponsored content specifically because of these changes that are further sapping display advertising. A blog post about this is a good idea.





Question

Qchain will offer as another option for advertisers to leverage services, similar to Google Ads, Amazon Ads and others?

Wally Xie’s Answers

We offer ourselves as a convenient option for purchasing native ads, which is less in the sphere of Google and Amazon. We are not looking to compete with Google and Amazon directly. Also, blockchain scaling issues prevent direct competition from being feasible in a lot of cases. For example, building a full ad exchange on the blockchain is still a tough endeavor right now, because of performance issues.

Question

isnt that a little like being on the back foot to begin with? Do you forsee challenges in scaling?

Wally Xie’s Answers

There will definitely be some challenges, but it will be easier for the direct buy application, because direct buy markets already have lower transaction rates per second than programmatic ad exchanges. Transactions per second will be less of a limiting factor for us.

We primarily will be carrying out transactions of large deals between advertisers and publishers (not many transactions in that case), and then additionally. handling payouts between advertisers and publishers for conversions. With cost-per-click and cost-per-impression numbers not correlating with actual conversion rates, and also CPC and CPI numbers being easy targets for ad fraud (bot views), conversions from actual paying customers is what the advertising industry is moving towards, so we are focusing on both native + cost-per-conversion to take advantage of that trend.

Question

was how you plan to scale? Publishers like to work with doubleclick because:

- its easy to integrate

- its a name they trust (Google)

- it integrates seamlessly with their merchant and analytics accounts

although advertisers hate to pay the Google tax and of course they hate fraud, they like:

- the wide range of media buy options out there

- the targeting criteria

and, its also not uncommon to see refunds in your account for fraudulent impressions

in the paper, you mention that you'll reach out to publishers directly. While that might work to on-board some initial publishers, the strategy doesn't seem scalable as a "long-tail" approach to bringing in many small publishers, and it won't work to bring in the larger publishers. Without a significant number of publishers on the platform, larger advertisers won't be interested in integrating with the platform, so there's a chicken/egg problem here to me, one way to tackle the problem would be to build out a traditional DSP and start signing advertisers. Then, the transition to a blockchain based platform is more of a"2.0" move, where advertisers on your existing DSP opt-in to the new, more transparent program. Or maybe this is what you're already doing and I didn't read the paper closely enough. of course this only handles the buy side, the move to sell side could be similar, though

Wally Xie’s answer

Being frank, when we first started drafting the white paper a few months back, we were looking at creating a decentralized direct buy marketplace because the goal was not to directly compete with Google right off the bat. The view was that the advertising industry tends to be fairly conservative, and it would definitely be crazy to think that we could take on Google overnight, even if we had all the right features. Indeed, we wanted to build things up gradually, starting with the direct buy marketplace, and what we envisioned rolling out initially was definitely more of a niche product. As time has gone on, it’s been made clear to us that there is a lot of interest in a more expansive blockchain advertising project, and based on some of my discussions with people from other companies, and that with some of the right features and support, some agencies and firms might be interested in jumping on board and exploring things earlier than expected.

For the time being, our plans for an initial roll out of the advertising application will still consist of our functional direct buy marketplace. We have a smaller team, and we want to make sure we do that well, as potentials angel and VC investors have mentioned that they are waiting to see that before jumping on board and supporting us in more amibitious endeavors. We do believe that the direct buy marketplace will offer some value at least to blogs and websites that are opting to handle their own direct buys right now to. But certainly, we are going to certainly accelerate the process of incorporating real time bidding functionality and take inspiration from more traditional ad exchanges. As you mention, we certainly anticipate the challenge of bringing more and larger publishers on board.

Yes, we’ve actually thought of the DSP approach. For DSP’s, I very much what admire DataXu has done, and am studying their platform implementation. That said, I’m genuinely not sure about starting with a non-blockchain DSP. It seems to me that the market for DSP’s is very well established and given the many established DSP choices, I’m still thinking about the features we would have to implement for a “traditional” DSP to convince an advertiser to initially jump on board with us. Blockchain implementation would be one thing that separates us from DSP’s and would be a major selling point. Without it, we need another killer feature.

So, long story short, I’m still thinking about the long term future and the next phase of the advertising application. Being frank, as this is such a complicated, arduous, and intricate process that requires due diligence and deliberation, I’m not ready to answer with a specific plan just yet.

I would like to mention that we will be building another as of yet unannounced data-oriented module as part of the Qchain platform to appeal to advertisers and marketers that will integrate with the advertising application down the line. For this module, I am also thinking about scalability and making it something to appeal to larger advertising and marketing clients. It is possible that this idea will give us a better chance at standing out and help bring on larger advertisers and marketers onto our platform to use the rest of our services. We will announce this idea in a separate white paper to be released soon, before our ICO.

Question

How is qchain decentralized if you guys are the medium??

Roy Zhao's Answer