If another occupation is the “world’s oldest profession,” advertising must be a close second with a history that dates back to at least ancient Egypt. It’s also one of the world’s most lucrative. The art of linking those offering stuff to those who want said stuff has spawned an industry in which companies were expected to spend nearly 558 billion US dollars in 2018. The world’s largest advertiser, Procter & Gamble, spent over 10 billion US dollars in advertising in 2015 alone.

This is the industry weBloc wants to disrupt.

CSO Wusic We says, “We want to take the value from the advertiser-centered system and bring it to a user-centered one.”

An official advertising partner of ICON, weBloc is striving to shift the paradigm of advertising by using blockchain to not only compensating the user – i.e., the person viewing the advertisement – for their contributions to the advertising ecosystem, but also by giving the user input over the kinds of advertisements they see, creating a hitherto unseen level of reciprocity between advertisers and the people they are trying to reach. In doing so, they also hope to rationalize the advertising ecosystem, to eliminate unnecessary middlemen, reorganize the price structure and bring a bit of transparency to the advertising process.

Putting the user back into the equation

Prior to joining the weBloc project in April, We spent years working in advertising analysis and development for Korean tech giants Naver and Kakao. He also started Korea’s first mobile advertising network, Cauly. His move to weBloc, however, encouraged him to reflect on his chosen line.

“I’ve been involved in advertising for a while, so I could think about a lot of things,” he says. “While working at Korean portals such as Naver or Kakao, we had plan advertising products that could get the most advertising money. And when showing the ads, we focused on algorithms that would show first the ads that could receive the most advertising money. When I came here, I thought about the user side for the first time.”

And what he realized was that the existing advertising ecosystem had no place for the user other than as a passive entity. “The existing system is centered on advertising costs,” he says. “If an advertiser spends 10 dollars, the advertising agency takes about 20-30 percent for profit. The media takes about 60 percent. It’s a structure where everyone is dividing up and taking the advertising costs for themselves.”

“Ads are completed when the users come and see the ad, click on it or actually participate in something. But they aren’t being compensated by the ad agencies or the advertisers.”

The weBloc platform rewards users by tokenizing their participation in advertising. Users earn WIP tokens for providing information about purchase intentions or evaluating advertisements. They can also earn WEB tokens by making contributions to the weBloc ecosystem and by holding tokens. They can exchange these WIP for WEB tokens, weBloc’s main token, which in turn can be exchanged for fiat.

weBloc also brings improved security to users by furthering transparency. The platform won’t sell your data while you’re not looking. “I did that in my previous jobs. It was more serious than I thought,” says We, noting that while big companies at least make users opt in before collecting and selling their data, small companies often use notices on their homepages, notices that you, the user, can’t see until you’ve already surfed in, by which time it’s too late. weBloc, on the other hand, collects only the data the user inputs themselves, and the transparency of blockchain means users can see exactly what’s being done with their information.

Building an alliance