The distributed ledger technology could help combat ad fraud

The Internet advertising industry became highly sophisticated since the beginning of the 21st century. Now corporate management can decide who sees a particular advertising message in their news feed, has wide range of stats and big data monitoring services, advertisers even came up how to prevent the harm from AdBlock-type browser plugins… but the business itself sometimes can be tricky.

The advertisement implementation goes through many steps and the whole process is often very fragmented, with gigabytes of data. Sometimes this leads to inefficient ad campaigns and bad investments in fake schemes, a thing any good corporation tries to avoid at all costs. This led some companies to consider the latest means of verification – blockchain.

To repair the trust (as the president of the Internet Advertising Bureau put it) is to solve two issues: the monitoring of information on the whole advertisement business and to verify all actors and partners in case of possible frauds. Before the blockchain was invented, the simultaneous resolving of these two problems seemed impossible. Among companies who are already working on this theme are: AdEx, AdLedger, BitTeaser and MadHive.

However, some publicists express doubts in the blockchain as a panacea for advertisement business problems. Blockchain requires standards not everyone will be ready to meet and the overall hype is currently creating an atmosphere where one can’t distinguish relevant solutions from irrelevant gimmicks.