If you’ve heard of Bitcoin then you
most likely have heard of Blockchain, the technology that enables Bitcoin and
other crypto currencies to exist and function. The technology is forecast to
disrupt many industries as it allows users to conduct transactions without a
middleman in a secure and transparent format.
Some of the industries that can
potentially be disrupted are car sales, voting, ridesharing, real estate,
insurance, sports management and loyalty cards. If Bitcoin is adopted by large
companies such as Amazon or Walmart, it will certainly have an impact on the
future of payments between search marketing agencies, website owners,
advertisers and others. Contract agreements will also be impacted, as the Blockchain
could be leveraged for more transparency and accuracy.
Blockchain is an incorruptible
digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not
just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. It’s like a
Google Doc spreadsheet that is shared with the public which displays
transactions and is tamperproof. Many are considering Blockchain to be as
impactful as the Internet was in the 90s.
In the digital marketing world,
many central authorities, such as Google and Facebook, connect advertisers with
website owners. For Example, Google is a central authority in programmatic ads,
where it helps advertisers run ads on websites via the Google Display Network.
Google essentially is the middleman that helps advertisers and website owners
trust each other. If they already trusted each other, they would not need
Google as an intermediary taking a cut of the profits.
Enter Blockchain, which can verify
that every user is genuine with 100 percent accuracy and that the website owner
is only charging the advertiser for genuine clicks through to their site. Then the
website owner and the advertiser don’t need a middleman to arbitrate their agreement,
which would save them money. Blockchain presents a big threat to Google’s
Display Network revenue.
Blockchain being the unhackable
distributed ledger is going to also help reduce online fraud. It will provide
transparency for persons involved in a transaction without giving away their
personal details, essentially proving they are a real person. Ad fraud is a big
problem. It cost advertisers over $7 Billion in 2016. A number of players
including Microsoft, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and DMA are already
working on Blockchain based digital identification system.
As companies start to adopt
Blockchain, they will need to integrate it with their websites. This involves
the web developers as well as the SEOs, if they are trying to gain organic
search benefits as well as display the information from the Blockchain
transactions. This will present both technical issues and opportunities in
which SEOs will have to work alongside developers to resolve compatibility issues
with different content management systems and website platforms. As new
Blockchains are developed and it is more widely adopted, it will certainly disrupt
the search marketing industry in many other ways. For now, search marketers
should pay close attention to Blockchain as it grows.
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