Times are changing, and we seek to help facilitate that change.

Influencer marketing is a red-hot marketing modality that has gained massive popularity in the past several years. This is largely attributed to influencers’ ability to reach target audiences and produce massive ROIs for brands; this equates to roughly 11x that of any other form of digital media.

Despite influencer marketing’s success and acclaim, the industry is not without its problems. Some of the most common issues that businesses face is finding the right influencers, ever-changing social media algorithms which make sponsored posts less visible, and fraudulent influencers.

Among these concerns, influencer fraud is likely the most problematic. Digiday recently reported some shocking statistics around the matter:

· A single day’s worth of posts tagged #sponsored or #ad on Instagram contained more than 50 percent fake engagement.

· Out of 118,007 comments, only 20,942 were not made by bot accounts.

· Bot comments are responsible for over 40 percent of total comments for more than 500 of 2,000 sponsored posts made each day.

As Nick Waken, founder of the influencer marketing agency Sway poignantly observed, “. . . this reminds me of banner ads in 2012 before people figured out that bots were responsible for all of their impressions.”

This is clearly a massive problem that requires a far greater degree of transparency if it is to be overcome.

This is not the only problem facing the influencer industry. As it stands, an increasing number of influencers are needing to rely on influencer marketplaces and business-partnerships to maintain their creative pursuits and communities. Because of this dynamic, more sponsored content needs to be created by influencers, and many of their fans aren’t interested in this content. This ultimately leads to a decline in engagement, community growth, and trust.

These two factors are exactly the types of obstacles that BOOSTO seeks to resolve.

What is BOOSTO?

BOOSTO is a blockchain-based, decentralized app store driven by the influencers that inhabit it. We currently tout more than 300 brands who have access to over 350,000 social media influencers capable of reaching well beyond 2 billion consumers across the globe.

BOOSTO supplies a protocol for creating decentralized applications (DApps) that form an immersive ecosystem that enables developers and organizations to easily and affordably build DApps that provide direct contact with influencers, influencer networks, social media platforms, and brands with consumers, services, companies and much more.

By building this system on blockchain technology, BOOSTO is capable of engendering higher levels of transparency and trust among influencers and brands.

This framework serves as a foundation to empower influencers and developers by unleashing the full potential of influencer led communities, by using blockchain as a foundation of trust and tokens as incentives to build various interactive decentralized applications.

What BOOSTO Offers Developers

BOOSTO seeks to provide abundant value to DApp developers, influencers, and advertisers alike.

As far as developers are concerned, BOOSTO provides development framework including SDKs, APIs and Oracle services for developers to create various social media DApps. Developers that get contracted by influencers enable these digital authorities to choose different DApps from the marketplace to create a personal platform and store for the influencer. Instead of receiving a flat fee, developers will receive compensation based on transactions via his or her applications. This will give the developer a constant stream of income for as long as the application is running.

What BOOSTO Offers Influencers

Influencers, on the other hand, can generate a more substantial income by featuring a personal store on their dedicated DApp. An influencer’s personal store is essentially that individual’s portal for connecting with audiences and advertisers. The products and services sold in an influencer’s personal store is determined by the social authority. This means that an influencer can:

· Utilize data provided by the Boostinsider platform and pick items recommended by Boostinsider, add his or her own design, then directly sell to his or her audience.

· Partner with brands, designers, and fans to create customized virtual items, provide in-person offline offers such as a dinner or one-on-one coaching time, or anything else that the community of influencers finds desirable.

This is a massive opportunity as half of the top 10 YouTubers who made the most money from YouTube ads have their own personal stores. For instance, Logan Paul’s merch store generates roughly 7.2 million monthly visits, with more than 90% of the traffic coming from his YouTube channel.

What BOOSTO Offers Brands

Coming back to the issues surrounding fraud and transparency in influencer marketing, BOOSTO enables merchants to verify influencer statistics through the purchase of BOOSTO tokens to access a specific influencer’s audience data.

Since this information exists within the blockchain, the data is assured to be secure and accurate, effectively eliminating concerns around fraud.

Moreover, since the implementation of smart contracts ensures that funds are only released once the predetermined terms have been met, brands can enter partnerships with influencers knowing that the individual will fulfill their end of the bargain.

What this means is that brands and advertisers can leverage demographics and metrics data of influencers to find brand target audiences, safely purchase performance-based influencer services directly from their personal stores, and consult or communicate with influencers directly as a means of building a prosperous relationship.

And since BOOSTO exists on the blockchain, tokenization is a big part of the ecosystem. Brands and advertisers pay influencers in tokens to buy influencers’ services.

BOOSTO sees that blockchain technology is ready to revolutionize much of the business world; this certainly encompasses various advertising modalities such as influencer marketing. We aim to create a healthier, profitable, transparent, and sustainable industry, flanked with a more connected influencer ecosystem where all parties can thrive. If you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into the inner working of our platform, check out our white paper.