Adbank Interview: Saving Online Advertising by Attacking Ad Fraud

CryptoAnalyst sets off a series of enlightening holiday interviews with an exclusive Q&A session with Jon Gilham, Adbank project founder and current CEO.

Before we get to the interview, though, let’s bring you up to speed on what Adbank is all about.

The problem Adbank solves?

Adbank is poised to solve a massive problem in the online advertising industry: bot fraud.

You get the idea: massive hordes of bots (56 percent of all internet traffic, to be exact) prowl the web, artificially inflating views and thus “robbing advertisers blind” and “killing the industry” as the Adbank whitepaper puts it.

That means every online advertiser in existence is theoretically getting less than half of what they’re paying for on average. That’s horrendous from a business perspective, no matter how you slice

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into the problem, you can check out the Adbank whitepaper here.

So what’s the Adbank solution?

Adbank strives to give advertisers “instant verification of advertising views.”

That means there will be no more wondering if 56 percent of your site views are coming from prowling bot swarms. Advertisers will be able to account for their money perfectly going forward.

But how?

The Adbank ecoystem, that’s how:

“The Adbank ecosystem is built upon several layers—each with the Adbank token ADB at its center. Being based on the ETH blockchain, Adbank’s core services are created as an interface between the blockchain and the other systems needed to fulfill the needs of the advertising platform. This allows products and solutions to be built in the transitional ways, easing the development process.” “This approach has been chosen to leverage the best features of traditional centralized solutions while capturing the advantages of a decentralized blockchain solution.”

About the upcoming ADB token sale

We’ll walk you through all the specs you need to know.

The ADB ICO begins December 14th and will run through January 21st, 2018. That is, of course, if the ICO’s hard cap of 50,000 ETH isn’t attained first.

Total supply: 1,000,000,000 ADB

Circulating supply: 560,000,000 ADB

Hard cap: 50,000 ETH

Price: 1 ETH = 7500 ADB

And there are bonuses to be mindful of during the ICO:

• 20% off base token price for first 24 hours

• 15% off base token price until December 22nd

• 10% off base token price until December 29th

• 5% off base token price until January 5th

Last word

Adbank can be very promising if its ecosystem takes off and solves online advertising fraud once and for all.

It’s certainly a token to keep an eye on if you favor real-world use cases that are needed here and now.

TLDR: The new online advertising platform Adbank seeks to make advertising fraud on the web a thing of the past thanks to instant verification of views.

Now, CryptoAnalyst is excited to present our exclusive interview with Adbank founder Jon Gilham. We sincerely appreciate him taking the time to answer through our questions so thoroughly.

Jon — thanks kindly for taking the time to talk with us today. We’ve got some questions that we know our readers would be interesting in knowing the answers to.

1) For any uninitiated readers, could you speak a little bit on ad fraud? What it is generally, and why it’s a major problem? (JG): Ad fraud takes many forms but in its most common form it is when a publisher uses click farms or other forms of fake traffic to have people click on ads and drive up profit. Digital advertising fraud is the #2 source of income for organized crime behind drugs with a jaw-dropping 56% of traffic being driven by bots. 2) The Adbank platform is going to be built on Ethereum. In your view, what were the advantages of going the ERC-20 route? Were there any disadvantages, conversely? (JG): The advantages of being built on Ethereum is that it’s a very well supported blockchain, and the solidity developer community is full of incredible talent. We overcome Ethereum’s speed limitations with a combination of on-chain and off-chain solutions. This gives us the best of the blockchain without being held back by its current limitations. 3) How disruptive can Adbank be in the advertising industry? Do you envision it becoming the go-to resource for guaranteeing media supply chains? (JG): Adbank’s moon-shot is to become the default digital advertising token used in exchange between advertisers and publishers. Our long-term focus is on being the platform that will allow existing ad tech to adopt and get the benefits of blockchain technology by incorporating our anti-fraud AI and analytics tools. 4) Can you delve deeper into how blockchain tech is incorporated into the project? (JG): The simple explanation is that as ads are displayed, the Adbank off-chain tech will deliver the ads and then the settlement payments between advertisers and publishers will occur on the blockchain. By combining these on-chain transactions with the patent-pending open-source Artificial Intelligence anti-fraud module, Adbank will be able to leverage both the existing data to help fight fraud and, for the first time ever in digital advertising, will be able to start “following the money” to really fight ad fraud. 5) How did the Adbank team come together? Could you speak to the origins of the collaboration? (JG): The core Adbank team is based out of Collingwood, Ontario. The founder and marketing team have a 10 year history in the digital advertising world. Chiron the CTO was on the founding team of a mobile ad platform that sold to Google and a very early adopter of cryptography in P2P communication. I was previously running a private equity company focused on online businesses and became aware of the potential for blockchain technology to disrupt the existing problems in digital advertising. I was able to bring together a local team of experts who were already doing world-class work, all deeply understood the problem and also the size of the potential disruption. 6) How do you see Adbank token becoming an integral part of the current advertising ecosystem? (JG): I see Adbank moving through a few phases. We see the existing ad-tech as part of the solution and are not aiming to replace everything but be the platform that introduces transparency through all parts of the current advertising ecosystem. We see Adbank becoming an integral part of the advertising ecosystem through the following phases … Phase 1 – Acquisition – Acquire existing ad networks and convert them to Adbank platform

Phase 2 – Disruption – Reduce profits and drive ADB token volume demonstrating superior anti-fraud abilities

Phase 3 – Ad-Tech Platform – Agnostic and expanded strategic partnerships

Phase 4 – Mass adoption – Majority of industry spending is through ADB tokens 7) Personally, what is your favorite element or aspect of the Adbank project or mission?

(JG): I come from the world of buying and selling online businesses and see our aggressive path to industry disruption through acquisitions being a model that many other innovative blockchain technology companies can adopt to accelerate disruption in many new fields. My technical co-founder would geek out on how the patent pending anti-fraud AI will be better able to detect fraudulent activity in the full digital advertising ecosystem.

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