Everything is an ad network

Web 3 will only get to a billion users by siphoning those users from the Web 2 side of the world—drinking their user milkshake, so to speak—and the only way to do that is via an attribution system that spans both.

Web 3 will have ads too. It already does in fact, they’re called NFT or token drops (essentially, giveaways that exploit the ability to send to any wallet). Not only do we have ads, we have ads fraud. When Optimism, a Level 2 chain that tries to make transacting cheaper, announced their token drop, thousands of fake users signed up to ‘farm’ the dr... See more

The Web of the future however will be about individual creators, their creative, and their audiences. It will also be about brands and developers, and their direct relationships with users and consumers. It will not be about gated publisher platforms, ad networks, and middle-men data brokers. That lot will (hopefully) be replaced by open protocols ... See more

Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction .... Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3... See more

Let’s say Farcaster, or other Web 3 social media like it, wants to run ads for the free version of the product. Rather than going out and building an entire ads system (as Facebook and every other social media publisher had to), they can use the composability and permissionlessness of Web 3 to spin up monetization quickly. Assuming an attribution s... See more

When token go up is no longer a law of physics and money is no longer free, the challenge of number go up—where the numbers are users or revenue—becomes much harder to solve. Right now, Web 3 companies are at pains to even measure those numbers, much less manipulate the few levers they have to make sure they do go up.