Adbank’s phrase to go with is: “Advertising is broken. Let’s fix it.” As a start-up, Adbank aims to innovate on the technologies of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence to bring a solution for the advertising industry which today, is a target of wide-based fraud. It aims to convert advertising networks to those which can be actively traced, thus providing advertisers and publishers an anti-fraudulent ecosystem to connect with each other and advertise effectively.

Advertisement Fraud – A Massive Issue Adbank Addresses

The advertisement industry works in a simple way. When an advertiser wants to advertise, they connect with relevant publishers. However, much of the advertisers are not aware of the publishing entities and often rely upon a middleman, who is responsible for getting an advertiser’s work done by a publisher. These ad networks, therefore often center around the middleman.

Unfortunately, these middlemen take up much of the advertiser’s payment, leaving the publishers to nibble on what’s left. This makes business highly unprofitable for the publishers, since much of the money involved in the process of advertising, goes to the middle man. According to Adbank’s whitepaper, the advertisement industry was worth around 220 billion USD dollars in 2016. As much as 20-50% of this huge sum went in the pockets of the middlemen. The advertisers and the publishers have no leverage over these middlemen; there is little transparency and most of the times, there is no means of validating the advertising news. This ultimately leads to fraud.

The problems of the advertising industry are not limited till here. The anti-fraud measures present to curb these nuisances are simply not effective. Fraudulent activity in the industry has become hard to identify, therefore a great deal of fraud occurs regardless of these measures.

Much of the fraud that occurs takes the form of invalid traffic brought in by bots in not only video viewership, but also website visits. With new improvements, these bots even mimic human activity, making it even harder to keep a track of them.

The advertisement industry is massive and is bound to grow. With little productive improvement in anti-fraud measures, and even more clever methods of committing fraud coming every other day, the amount of revenue going in fraud will grow dramatically. Following is the estimate given in Adbank’s whitepaper.

Welcome Adbank

Technical Details

The solution that Adbank offers to curb the menace in the industry is not hard to understand. Adbank’s goal is to convert the current ad networks to networks on blockchain, a peer-to-peer system that will entirely get rid of the middleman. With blockchain in place, the payment procedures are traced and looked upon for any fraud. Meanwhile, all the information is stored in the blockchain thanks to this multitude of networks. The information available off-chain is fed to Adbank’s AI which works upon it to detect fraud. This is unique, because the data fed to this patent-pending AI is only available to Adbank alone.

Anti-Fraud Techniques

Adbank’s anti-fraud techniques access advertising databases, user logs, ad images, rendering of web pages, blockchain transactions, and the latest artificial intelligence learning. Through it is able to perform activities like:

Finding transactional blockchain activity coupled with web pages that fail to render all expected ads to detect a predatory publisher on the system.

Catching unexpected and typical shifts in website visitors along with unusual mass selling of tokens to other currency on the blockchain to indicate a publisher that’s buying traffic, and selling the profits as quickly as possible to avoid detection.

Adbank is also focused on curbing mobile application based fraud. Adbank is also working on creating a system where the end-users contribute to the Adbank anti-fraud system by acting as reviewers of the AI generated anti-fraud reports.

The Adbank platform works on the Ethereum Network, and has the token ADB. The start-up offers a multitude of services and products in the advertising space. Its API is available publicly while the technology is kept open source.

As of marketing, Adbank provides an ad network, analytics package, and an AI anti-fraud system as its first products.

The ADB Token

In the Adbank ecosystem, participants use the token ADB to pay for the services they avail. With each ADB representing an ad, the publishers sell these ads to the advertisers, while buying these ads ultimately pays the publishers. The transfer of the token only occurs once the service is provided – when an ad is displayed on a publisher site from an advertiser, an amount of ADB tokens is transferred from the advertiser to the publisher. These tokens can be held, redeemed or used to buy analytics packages with. The ADB token can also be used to pay the end-user participants for their reviews on the AI reports.

Total supply: 1,000,000,000 ADB

Road Map

April 2017 – Opportunity to Solve Online Advertising Problem with Blockchain Identified

May 2017 – Technical and Go-to Market Strategy Developing

June 2017 – Development Training Starts

Oct 2017 – Whitepaper Released

Nov 2017 – Alpha Preview Released

Dec 2017 – ICO launches December 14th

Jan 2018 – ICO finishes on January 21st, Tokens Released Following Week

Mar 2018 – Adbank Network Ad Platform Launched

May 2018 – Acquire and Convert Existing Ad Network and Drive 0% Net Profit

to Increase Token Liquidity