We have high hopes for the technology we have built to distribute Incent in return for any form of valued engagement, online or off.

The nature of advertising is changing fast, in parallel to the changing shape of our economy as a whole. The growth of connectivity, rise of social networking and the shift of so much of our lives to the online environment has resulted in what we might call the ‘attention economy’. Companies of all kinds compete for our time and interest, monetising that in a variety of ways. But attention is a scarce resource: none of us have more than 24 hours a day, and there has never been greater competition for our eyes and ears.

From pay-per-view to paid-per-view

We are convinced that this reality is bringing about a profound revolution in business models, particularly for online companies. Competing successfully for our attention in such a crowded space is difficult, to say the least, especially for smaller companies. The logical result of the growing attention economy is for publishers to attract users not simply by offering free resources (web services, great content, etc) but by actually paying users to engage with them.

Incentivising anything

Much of Incent’s publicity to date has been around Insync, our core technology that enables users to sync their bank accounts and for us to distribute Incent frictionlessly to them with every spend they make. This will also be the focus for our coming Australia-wide marketing campaign. However, in terms of development, we are now also pouring our efforts into Ingage.

Our aim is to build out and internationalise Ingage, so that anyone, anywhere can incentivise engagement of any form.

Gaming has emerged as a major use case for cryptocurrency, and we know from our trial with Gfinity that crypto rewards are a great way to incentivise greater audience participation in eSports. There’s no reason that ability shouldn’t be extended to other media. Ingage can be used to reward users for reading emails, listening to podcasts, watching gaming streams or adverts – just about any activity you can think of. This is the inevitable evolution of the attention economy, and we want to be at the forefront of it.

Right now we’re in discussion with the eSports community about the potential for increasing audience engagement and therefore gamer revenues. By the end of this year (and hopefully sooner) we would like to have one or more pilot schemes running, and have established relationships with key players in the industry – both at home and abroad. Watch this space!

Incent is live! Australian users can access rewards in Incent tokens on every spend they make. To find out more, visit www.incent.com.