Engagement Token Hits Advertising World

Using the internet today is mainly free and provides people with unlimited access to content on millions of sites. This, however, limits the ability for content creators, like newspapers and magazines, to monetize their work through any other method that is not advertising. Most publishers rely on advertising giants like Google and Facebook to disseminate their content via their platforms, which makes the process of publishing difficult and expensive. This is where Engagement Token comes in. Engagement Token is used by the platform SolidOpinion that aims at rewarding users and publishers who create content by compensating them with tokens.

The platform has seen a tremendous rise recently as it has over 4 million users registered on the site while also receiving over 200 million views per month. Although the platform is still in its infancy phase, the cryptocurrency records over 100 thousand transactions on its platform.

Such a big and fast-growing platform has attracted large publishers like the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, among others. It has resulted in Engagement Token raising $7.7 million from publishers and ventured capitalists.

Problems that Engagement Token (EGT) hopes to solve

• A centralized ad system: As of now, the advertisement world is controlled by a few giants, like Google, Facebook and Bing. These platforms control the majority of ads and information disseminated on the web.
• Big market players in the online monetization sector, such as Google Adsense offer publishers an opportunity to earn by monetizing their content. Sadly, it doesn’t accommodate enough content creators.
• Intrusive ads: With so many brands and even more websites popping up every day, the competition for brands has increased tremendously and has resulted in websites using more aggressive types of ads. The use of such advertisements results in a bad user experience for the readers.
• Lower engagement: With so much content being created daily, user engagement has decreased significantly. Though more people spend more and more time on the internet today, they have access to millions of platforms, which decreases their engagement on any one platform or site.

SolidOpinion and Engagement Token hope to capitalize on finding solutions to the current business model of online publishing and offer a better option to traditional monetization of content.

How SolidOpinion and Engagement Token Work

This new platform is a way to decentralize online advertising and compete with advertising titans. Its primary goal is to give the power back to the publishers and their users since their content is the backbone of search engines and social media platforms. This makes sense since, without user-generated content or publishers, Google wouldn’t have much to search for and Facebook wouldn’t have much to show.

Advertisers can buy the tokens and place ads on specific pages of their wish. This enhances the user experience because each advert gets space at the most appropriate spot. It also helps advertisers to target their audience effectively. Premium ad spaces include comments, headlines and any other part of the pages.

SolidOpinion is based on a pay-per-article system, which allows advertisers to buy ad space with tokens to put forward ads to the most appropriate audience. Thus, reduces the chances of users blocking ads, leaving the site and increases revenues.

The Engagement Token aims at using game-and-reward strategies to increase traffic. The token on the SolidOpinion platform is designed to reward a user’s engagement with a publisher’s content by adding value to the user’s interaction. The rate of every engagement is set out by the publisher through tokens. Users earn Engagement Tokens by subscribing to newsletters, sharing, or writing comments on a piece of content. The main goal is to make users spend more time on the site and engage, thus earn the publisher more revenue.

How Will it Change the Cost of Advertising?

There are a few factors that determine the pricing of advertising: the influence of the publisher, their competition and the number of readers or users they have. Engagement Token aims to break these norms by focusing more on the user and their activity rather than the platform. The system relies on the users sharing the content instead of the ads, so this can significantly reduce advertisement cost.

Final Thoughts

It will be interesting to see what other publishers adopt this system and how much engagement the users can generate to earn rewards. Most importantly, how will advertising giants like Google and Facebook compete with this platform?