You may have heard that Google and Facebook are accounting for a lion’s share of the digital advertising bucks, leaving the small change to everyone else. Both smaller websites and established media companies don’t like that landscape, but there is little they can do about it. Simply put, most users are visiting the two giant’s platforms, giving them the leverage other media organizations don’t have.
But can a decentralized system help smaller companies compete?
Enter PressCoin
This startup thinks that a blockchain-based system could help more companies benefit from online advertising and to that end, it is launching a platform and a crypto-token — marked “NEWS” — which would be used for rewarding of all stakeholders in the system.
Powered by Quintype’s AWS-for-media developer cloud, these data-first technologies were originally built by PressCoin designer and serial entrepreneur Amit Rathore in his previous startup.
PressCoin aims to grow at a “disruptively fast pace” and provide real competition to the platform giants in the news space within five years. It will bring together cloud-based publishing and big data technology, plus the innovation engine of cryptocurrency and the blockchain, but can it succeed?
NEWS token
As mentioned, the system would use a crypto-token called NEWS to enable publishers to trade in content, traffic, advertising and subscriptions. On the other hand, readers would be able to earn tokens by providing value to the network through activities such as contributions, moderation and commerce.
This win-win scenario could both engage readers/consumers and reward content creators, but again — will that be enough to push major media companies on board? Without content from top-tier publishers, PressCoin can hardly succeed in the long run, even with “proper” incentives in place.
To attract all the right players, PressCoin has formed an alliance with CointypeX.com, a new Swiss bank-powered crypto exchange, that will enable native NEWS transactions to occur at minimal cost in a full range of fiat currencies. Market participants will be able to easily convert to the fiat currency of their choice in real-time. And that in turn would enable PressCoin’s organic liquidity to grow rapidly.
The bold goal
Not only does PressCoin aim to disrupt the industry, it has put a figure on it; actually, three figures: Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), Gross Domestic Product (GDP equivalent) and growth in monthly active users (MAU) across the network of platforms and publishers within the PressCoin ecosystem.
PressCoin begins its assessment by using the size of the global news media and advertising economy, estimated to be between $700 billion and $1 trillion in size. From here, they estimate to grow the NEWS Crypto Economy to represent 0.01 percent, or 1/10,000th of this global turnover, which equals to $70-$100 million in sales transactions executed in NEWS.
“With this small start in 2018, with new platforms being launched and new media properties choosing to become part of the PressCoin ecosystem, we see the standard network effect starting to take hold, and acceleration of the economy starts,” PressCoin says in its blog. “The YoY growth has been modeled on factual data: early years of growth at many of the social networks extrapolated for the starting systems we already have in place.”
By the end of its fifth year in 2022, the model estimates GMV will have grown to $33 billion.
ICO is under way
PressCoin, obviously, needs money to develop its infrastructure and provide the news industry with access to a set of NEWS token-based markets. These markets will be used to buy and sell all the inputs and outputs of digital media businesses, including content, traffic, advertising, subscriptions and services.
And so PressCoin’s ICO was open and is running through January 22nd, with the goal of raising $100 million. You may want to check it out…