Recently, MEDIA Protocol’s CEO, James Tabor, and CTO, Mark White, sat down for a no-holds-barred AMA session on Telegram. They took turns answering some of the MEDIA Protocol community’s most pressing questions. Many of these focused on the benefits of the protocol to content creators and publishers. Some of the key areas discussed during this first AMA session have been collated and are detailed below.

I’m a content creator, how simple can it be for me to promote my articles over CryptoCatnip?

Content creators and publishers would need to create a smart contract specifying how much of the MPT would go to a dApp like CryptoCatnip. This would mean that while you are promoting your content, you are rewarding the distributor as part of a network including consumers. Not just THE NETWORK as we do with the existing media buying model.

If you write crypto content and would like us to add you to the feed, please feel free to contact us on our Telegram channel and we will. It’s all about community.

How can MPT be used for advertising?

Whilst there are other crypto tokens focused on traditional display advertising, the area we see unaddressed by other tokens, where MPT is of great value, is for branded content: that is, any kind of content that users would click through to from a displayed ad. In a world where the lines between traditional and advertising content are increasingly blurred, we are able to bridge the two with MPT.

How are MPT attached to a URL?

In order to create a promotion against a given URL, the promoter (which doesn’t have to be the publisher, though it normally will be) submits that URL to the smart contract, together with the tokens to be made available for the promotion. This allows information about which URLs are being promoted to be made available on the blockchain, and read by any dApp.

In terms of URLs that are paywalls, where the user is paying for access to content behind the URL, normally the URL will contain a limited ‘free’ version of the content (e.g. the first paragraph) and a META tag indicating that this is paywalled with MEDIA Protocol, along with the number of tokens required to access that content. The publisher server will contain a mapping of this to the payments it has received via the smart contract in order to provide access.

Can you assign different amounts of MEDIA Tokens for different engagement actions? And if so, how is that worked out, is it through a smart contract?

Yes, we have provided for this flexibility — when a publisher creates a promotion (either using the promotion portal or by directly calling the smart contract) they can specify amounts and interaction types. By splitting a promotion they can have different amounts being rewards for different interaction types.

Will there be an easy to use interface, like a sort of publisher tools?

We are building an open source “Publisher Portal”. This will be similar to the way that people already buy ads, or promote content online. Instead of teaching a user to code solidity, they will be able to easily add URLs, specify interactions and publish their “Smart URLs” to the blockchain.

Publisher Portal will also contain analytics and graphs of the interactions that take place.

How will content producers be able to access and analyse the data generated by MEDIA Protocol?

Every time there’s an interaction with a piece of promoted content, that interaction data is anonymously recorded on the blockchain, where anyone can access the data. Content producers can either access this data directly or, we foresee an ecosystem of tools that provide an extra layer of analytics on top of this data. We are working on creating the first implementations of this as part of the Publisher Portal.

Also, you will have the direct data relationship with the consumer. Consumer data still has to be handled with due care by people who implement MPT. What MPT does is allow consumers to be rewarded for their data and their interactions with your content.

How do publishers/content producers go about implementing MEDIA Protocol?

There are a couple of approaches open to publishers and content producers:

a) They can implement directly on top of the protocol itself — this provides the most flexibility but is also the largest amount of work for publishers or content producers. We will provide a reference code to help with this.

b) We are providing a variety of SDKs to allow extremely simple integration. This will include web and mobile SDKs as well as higher level integration, such as a WordPress plugin.

Is the CryptoCatnip model easy to replicate, like a PaaS?

We intend CryptoCatnip to be a reference architecture that any publisher can follow to create their own application.

In addition, as previously mentioned, we will be providing SDKs that make it extremely easy to implement MEDIA Protocol into any website or application.

For more information regarding MEDIA Protocol find us on our social channels below:

Website: www.mediaprotocol.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MEDIAProtocol

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MEDIA_Protocol

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/media-protocol/

Telegram: https://t.me/Media_Protocol_Community and https://t.me/MP_Announcements

Medium: https://medium.com/@mediaprotocolsm

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MEDIAProtocol