We operate in our own niche and are quite different from other folks in this space. We are developing a native ads/sponsored content marketplace that will allow advertisers and companies (can be in-house marketing departments of retailers, for example) to transact in sponsored content from one singular, convenient interface. We stand alone as a collaborative sales platform for native advertising and sponsored content in the blockchain space.

Native advertising and sponsored content are becoming more and more of a hot growth area, as traditional web display advertising has continued to gradually decline in effectiveness. Conversion and click through rates for display ads are quite anemic in this day and age. Meanwhile, native advertising is seeing a lot more success with respect to the all important metric of conversions; conversions are more important than clicks and impressions, as they mean actual revenue and sales, and a much much harder to spoof by definition. See the following links for more information about native advertising:

http://www.businessinsider.com/programmatic-ad-buying-declining-native-advertising-increases-2017-7

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/ad-industry-insiders-are-connected-to-a-fraud-scheme-that?utm_term=.bwdN3larq#.he0zWoXkQ

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/05/24/10-ways-to-protect-advertisers-from-growing-ad-fraud-problems/#1cd066e601a6 (cost per conversion is better article)

http://www.businessinsider.com/native-advertising-is-the-future-of-internet-marketing-strategy-2016-5

So, what are problems with native advertising? For one, the present process of buying native ad units is incredibly complicated and inefficient. Content publishers need to have large sales teams to cold call companies to advertise on their sites. Advertisers need to task account executives to individually navigate to websites and find contact info on those websites to reach out. Another problem is that native advertising presently does not adhere to a set of standards, which is confusing to both advertisers and consumers:

https://medium.com/the-qchain-blog/nem-meets-native-how-qchains-tech-will-enrich-digital-advertising-cd8dbfba3c8f

Qchain’s direct buy native marketplace can disrupt the process of buying and selling advertising, and gives a central point from which native ad standards can be applied and enforced.

Our target clients are both advertising agencies and retailers, along with content publishing networks such as Buzzfeed, Vox, and Univision/Gizmodo-media.

We aim to have a production ready product built up from our existing demo by Q2 2018, and then, to build a sales team to immediately start targeting the business of smaller-scale content publishers, such as individual blogs, ranging up to larger publishers, like Buzzfeed and the New York Times.

We feel that we have a very solid idea here that has been confirmed by our discussions with ad industry and content publishing professionals. We just need investment to rapidly build up our dev team to be able to turn around the production-ready and battle-tested product quickly. Should we obtain sufficient funds for development, we foresee positive revenue in about 2 years from ad industry native spend. We aim to keep our team lean, efficient, and small to get to positive revenue more quickly. And then, we are targeting an exit to an ad tech or marketing form within 3 - 5 years of the company’s creation.

Read our piece about integrating this marketplace with NEM, https://medium.com/the-qchain-blog/nem-meets-native-how-qchains-tech-will-enrich-digital-advertising-cd8dbfba3c8f, and the piece featuring us in Bitcoin Magazine, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/native-advertising-roadmap/, for further information.

The EOS leader who gives the talks at conferences is super crazy. Don't really like him. He has a major cultish vibe. At his talks, he keeps on talking about how we need to make the world more like Burning Man to make the world a better place. Burning Man is really only a haven now for super rich Silicon Valley CEO's who can afford luxury trailers. Just turned me off.