There’s a handful of content platforms in the ICO and blockchain space, all claiming to be the “next big thing”.

These projects vary in their progression, features, and polish, but they all share a common goal: making life better for content creators. To achieve this noble goal, they share a common solution as well: content monetization facilitated through blockchain.

But when looking at these projects collectively at face value, that’s really the extent of what they aim to provide. Many seem to clone a YouTube or Instagram, slap some blockchain on top of it, and say “here ya go!”

Half solutions are half measures

While content monetization is a large component of the problem, it isn’t the entire problem. The other half is the idea of content discovery — how users find content and creators.

Content discovery and content monetization are directly tied to one another; the former is how users find content, and the latter is how ads are placed on that content. Advertisers want to show their ads to people who are most likely to act upon them.

How do existing content platforms accomplish this goal? They operate on traditional horizontal search technology — monetization is facilitated through centralized algorithms that allows the platform to place ads on content at a large scale.

The system acts as a bridge between users and advertisers; it offers users a way to find this content (keyword inputs), and it offers advertisers a way to place ads on that content (keyword inputs).

Here’s a simple example: a user visits YouTube and searches “best gaming PC builds” and selects a video from the page of returned results. A few minutes in, he is served an advertisement for NVIDIA’s newest graphics card.

YouTube needs users to participate in the keyword-carousel of horizontal search, so they can feed them into their monetization system and generate ad revenue.

A platform that operates on this horizontal model of content discovery has a number of disadvantages.

For one, it is extremely difficult to break through and gain traction as a new creator. Searching “gameplay” will return the same number of videos on the first page of results in 2019 as it did in 2010. However, the amount of content creators operating in the gaming niche is exponentially greater today.

Content discovery remains static, while the content pool swells. With static discovery models like this, new entrants (creators) face a discouraging, uphill battle. They’re much more likely to get buried than show up in a user’s search results.

An analysis of YouTube’s viewing statistics from 2006 to 2016 supports this assertion. An increasing amount of content/creators, paired with static search, leads to decreased discoverability.

This environment brings with it a number of problems, which only get worse with growth and age.

How do new creators get discovered?

How will users find new and interesting content?

So when other blockchain projects, that may seem similar to Conjure, seek to create a better alternative, they identify monetization as the key issue. This is true, however, they fail to capitalize on the new ecosystem they create as a byproduct of decentralizing monetization.

By shedding reliance on centralized monetization, there’s no longer an obligation to adhere to the outdated methods of content discovery — but these other projects do. They provide decentralized content monetization, while retaining centralized content discovery.

Conjure’s Approach

So, we decided to not only solve the issue of monetization, but to capitalize on it and provide a new architecture for content discovery.

To do this, we looked for classification systems that scale with the growth of information. Eventually, we began toying around with Linnaean Taxonomy.

This system has been around for a few hundred years, and has successfully organized all life on Earth into a logical framework.

No matter how diverse the organism, taxonomy can accommodate — from the gentle sunflower to the humpback whale.

We chose to take this structure and incorporate it within Conjure. Where Taxonomy sorts organisms based on characteristics, Conjure will sort content based on community.

The Conjure Depth Engine

By combining aspects of both horizontal and vertical search, Conjure’s web of communities, or content verticals, are bound together through taxonomy.