Fundamentals
Why will Alkimi Exchange appeal to publishers (apps/websites who sell ads)?​
Publishers are going to be attracted because more of the ad dollar is flowing through to them not middle men, which means they can expect to see advertisers willing to pay higher CPMs for their eyeballs and spend more with them overall. They also have the opportunity to reduce the number of ad units on their pages as a result which creates stickier content and higher quality views on the fewer but better ads - which improves customer experience for their viewers, themselves and advertisers.
What is an Advertising Exchange and how does a decentralised one (Alkimi) work?​
See Alkimi CEO Ben explain this in video form here
How will consumers benefit from Alkimi?​
Consumers will benefit immediately from publishers and advertisers switching to Alkimi as those sites won't need to overload them with as many adverts so the user experience is greater and they can enjoy the content and lower distractions. If consumers want to benefit further they can buy $ADS tokens and stake them so that advertisers on the platform can borrow them to pay for their (much lower) fees and in return share in those fees as rewards. All of those will make $ADS more and more valuable as more advertising runs through the Alkimi exchange network.
In brief, what is Alkimi?​
It matches advertisers (who want to display their ads) with publishers (who have people viewing content on their websites/apps etc) and in real-time lets them transact so ads appear for users. This is how 95% of the $500+ billion digital advertising market is traded. Alkimi will be compatible with all these other exchanges by using standards so that advertisers&publishers can easily switch to it. But it will have the advantage of greater transparency and much lower fees (typically 49% of money spent on an ad goes to middlemen not the publisher you're buying the spot off) in the region of 1.5% by using the power of cutting-edge blockchain technology. These fees will be paid for in the $ADS token, and advertisers can also buy and stake them to lower their fee percentage slightly, which is what gives the token utility as token holders themselves can stake the token to receive a percentage of all the advertisers' fees. This staking APY and the need for advertisers to use it drives demand and thus price up. If you have any further questions let me know.
This video is a quick explainer: link
Also, see these longer explainers:
Has Alkimi been audited?​
Here’s the pre-launch audit: link Remember the project is planning on moving to Constellation’s l_0 token at some point so the erc20 token is not the long term solution. If you check the roadmap in the whitepaper or token primer (in the pins) you’ll see the development dates, which of course will include code audits but there is no test/mainnet yet.
How will Alkimi change the relationship between me (as a publisher) and advertisers?​
Right now, advertisers have been trained not to care about publishers. They don't buy ads on your site, they buy eyeballs (of their preferred flavour) that happen to be on your site. That devalues you and your content, on top of all the fees that get taken between the advertiser paying and you receiving payment. We need to get back closer to a model like press advertising where context matters and having your ads seen amongst premium content matters. Alkimi will help clean up pages so they don't have as many ad spots (by raising the value of each view by reducing fees) but also by giving greater weight to the site/context of an ad view once more. It's exciting times.
How does Alkimi work if there are further crack-downs on the use of data in advertising?​
Reductively, one can divide advertising into two types: “brand” (making people aware of the brand/product and its key values/attributes) and “response” (making people consider purchasing it, and act on these considerations). One theory that has been fairly well proven is that you should spend about 60% on the former and 40% on the latter. By spending money on your brand you “drive demand” - make people want and value you, and then you “harness demand” when they are closer to purchase. Most of the time people aren’t in the market for your product and service, but you need to spend a lot, so when they are, you are “top of mind”. The brand's marketing doesn’t need to be personalised, or even that targeted - again, marketing theory says that most people can be your customer, so promote yourself as widely as possible (that's called “reach” in marketing lingo). Lots of people think advertising is about finding the exact right people, or loyal and heavy customers - but most of a brand’s customers, are mostly customers of someone else. e.g. 50% of coke sales are to people who buy it once a year. So they make most of their money by telling everyone to buy it, so that most do so occasionally - they don’t try and find and talk to their superfans. This is the same for all categories. Even in extreme examples of supposed loyalty and heavy users - super fans of VW for instance - these are just as likely to buy another brand for their next car. So most advertising spend does not need personal user data. Towards the “bottom of the funnel” - where you’re talking to people who are looking to buy NOW, - yes, here you can use signals to be more personalised. But looking at things like “are they on a car website” is pretty much as targeted as you need to be. You don’t need “what's the license plate of the car they drive at the moment”. Marketers have used data because they could and it seemed smart, not because it was actually effective. So if ad exchanges like Alkimi have a bit less personal data flowing through them…then no loss - advertisers will use other, broader signals to decide what ads to buy. If there are some cases where personal data might be useful, then it can be more permission-based and controlled by the user (say via NFTs…;)).
How will the end of tracking cookies impact Alkimi?​
The imminent death of cookies is weighing on the minds of lots of advertisers and adtech platforms. The first point to understand is that an Advertising Exchange is agnostic to the type of tracking used. It matches the "eyeballs" (site visitor/app user) a publisher has with an advertiser who wants to show their ad to this type of user. How they determine this is based on the information the publisher supplies on the user (what sort of content they're viewing, machine they're using, and yes currently cookie data). An advertiser can then supplement this with data from their own data management platform to determine which eyeballs match their needs and audience. If cookies aren't part of the mix then other signals are used. In most cases these stop individuals from being identified 1:1 by cookies but instead put users into cohorts (groups) that share features without revealing private information. So Alkimi will leverage whatever the overall industry moves onto from cookies. In addition, the team are experimenting with NFTs (as you may have noticed) as a way to allow users to choose what information to share with advertisers, to then receive more accurate advertisement targeting and also benefit from the ad spend targeting them...
Who are the team behind Alkimi?​
Ben Putley, Adam Chorley and Chandru Narayana. For more detail read the whitepaper on the website - and check out the core team's bios. They're very doxable on linkedin with great experience in the industry and big connections.