“WITH THE ADVENT OF BLOCKCHAIN, WE REALIZED THAT TECHNOLOGY GRANTED A POSSIBLE BASIS FOR A SOLUTION.”

Coinist was recently fortunate enough to chat with the team at Ubex about their global decentralized advertising exchange. Before we jump into the interview, take a minute and watch their short explainer video below:

Hi, and thanks for chatting with us today. Let’s jump in and have you introduce your project to our audience. After watching the explainer video above I’m sure they have a general idea about your project. So rather than giving us a summary of what your project seeks to accomplish, instead tell us about where the inspiration came from to start UBEX. Is your experience mainly as an advertiser or publisher? Did Ubex spawn out of personal frustration?

Thank you for having me here, it is a pleasure. The idea for Ubex came as a result of a combination of efforts and work experience with the advertising industry. My colleagues and I are intimately familiar with its workings and saw all the many issues that plague the industry. With the advent of blockchain, we realized that the technology granted a possible basis for a solution. If we could make the world a bit better and improve an entire industry, we saw no reason not to do so.

Let’s now explain one of the main pain points for each user within your platform. Let’s start with users. On your website you hint that Ubex could help reduce some of the high risks associated with scammers “coercive and provocative” use of advertising methods. Can you explain what these methods are giving real world examples and also telling us how Ubex would week these ads out for the user?

Scammers have always existed in every industry. The advertising industry is no exception. One of the most popular instruments that scammers use is called shaving. This is a method through which they simply ramp up views artificially and get paid for bots and fake IDs that they themselves usher onto advertiser websites. Another example of fraud is blatantly providing false statistics by relying on the fact that the advertiser cannot track the actual data. This is basically abuse of trust. The publishers suffer too as they often don’t receive payment for their services. There is also plenty of blackmail on the part of the publishers, who coerce and spook advertisers with threats to ban their ads and so on. One of the most provocative methods is using ad formats that have not been approved by the advertiser, and this results directly in negative publicity for the advertiser. We don’t need this kind of degradation in such a massive industry.

Now let’s look at a problem advertisers face. One of the points on your website mentions “difficulty” as a major problem for advertisers. You mention that the difficulty in finding all available advertising channels often leads to companies having to hire marketing staff. Give us an example of what this challenge looks like for current day advertisers and tell us how, using a real world example, Ubex would change the process.

Marketing specialists are expensive and are not often effective. This is connected with the basic fact that a human mind simply cannot hold all the information available on the market or necessary for creating an efficient ad campaign. Even a marketing staff made up of an entire floor of specialists is often insufficient. But the results of their work can also be quite dubious as the specialists themselves are reliant on the publishers, who cannot always be trusted. So, it is a vicious cycle. These are costs and expenses that do not always breed results. Our AI and blockchain base can maintain a near infinite amount of information and analyze it in seconds on the basis of a large number of criteria. All of this instantly. No human can match that. And this is where Ubex comes in.

One of the main difficulties you highly for publishers is the fact that they struggle with low earnings and the inability to forecast future payments from advertisers. Can you explain, using a real world example, how Ubex would help solve this problem?

The fact that our system works on an instantaneous per result basis of payment in internal platform UBEX tokens is the guarantee that everyone will get paid on time for their work. There is no human factor involved. Just mathematics. The publisher does what the advertiser wanted and they get paid UBEX tokens from the advertiser’s account automatically.

Now I have some questions about your self-learning neural networks. One of the features of your platform don’t fully understand after reading your white paper is how the platform collects data from web browsers. It seems to me that one of your biggest selling features is better bringing together consumer and advertiser. However, this requires that you know something about the users visiting the websites. How is this data gathered? In your whitepaper you mention that “Training the system core to obtain relevant and accurate forecasts is a laborious process. In this regard, the platform will provide the ability of adding statistical data to the site user’s actions, which can be used as a training sample for the system’s core. The site owners who provided data will receive a reward proportional to the contribution of the data provided for training the system core“. But can you tell us in more detail what the process of gathering information from the web browser looks like (demographic, user profile, use preferences etc).

The publishers and advertisers who sign up on our platform will share their databases with us. How they gather information about users is their business, but that is largely done through cookies and registration forms. It is the interests of the platform participants to share their databases so we may cater to their needs. In fact, we offer rewards to our platform participants for their efforts in training the platform AI. It would be foolish to think that advertisers and publishers do not maintain databases about their clients and visitors.

To add-on to my question above, in your video you mention that your system will not only know what ads will appeal to the user the most but it will also know the best format and the best placement. In your white paper you mention that “For those fractions of a second, while the website is loading, the system analyzes the composition of the audience of the website, correlates this data with client targeting and selects the appropriate advertising format.” But can you explain in more detail and using a real world example how Ubex can 1. Determine a user / web browser ad preferences and placement and 2. How you store that data to be re-used for future visits on Ubex publisher sites?

We use the data provided by advertisers and publishers to analyze client preferences. A split second is more than enough for our AI to compile a visitor profile as their browsing history is available. Based on the previous browsing history and preferences, we can create a very accurate image of what kind of visitor we are dealing with. For instance, if the visitor’s history contains a lot of visits to websites related to clothing, we will display ads that fit their interests. You must understand that ad slots on websites are not fixed, they change according to the user that visits them. If you and I visit the same website, the ads we will see on the same page will be different for you and for me, because we have different browsing histories. As for storage, we have the equipment to store the vast databases, the servers and the blockchain itself.

You mention that the results from each target action will be stored in a transparent database. Can you explain what target actions are and how this database can be accessed? Is the database currently live?

Target actions are dependent on what the advertiser specifies as target actions. For one advertiser, who sells tickets, for instance, the target actions are sales of tickets. For a video blogger, the target actions are video views. And so on. It all depends on what the advertiser perceives as actions on the part of the audience that will lead to the results they expect, be they sales, site views, redirects, calls, whatever. The database can be accessed only by our system as it is needed to carry out the matching calculations. And the database is not live at the moment as the network has not yet been launched and there are no participants as of yet to formulate the database. As we said and as you so rightly reiterated – forming databases is a tedious process.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We wish you the best of luck with your project! To our audience, if you’d like to learn more about Ubex you can head over to their website found here: https://www.ubex.com/