Pr3sence

Pr3sense is the `Google Ads` platform for Web 3. We help advertisers grow and dApps earn by showing the best ads through ML techniques which use blockchain data.

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Inspiration

Have you ever thought of starting your own project, but were blocked by the struggles of marketing?

Marketing a Web3 project is hard and time-consuming. Zero-cost marketing strategies take months to yield good results, and classical Web2 marketing tools (e.g. Google Ads, Twitter, …) do not perform as well as they could on Web3 projects - why?

They do not utilize on-chain data to make recommendations to users.

But what if we could have a system where ads are shown on popular dApps, that target specific users that could be interested in your project? 🔗

This would be a win-win for both projects and users! But how can you target a pseudo-anonymous audience? 🤔

Targeting users on the blockchain is actually possible 🤯

By using on-chain data, we can identify users’ interests and figure out good recommendations of projects that they could be interested in.

This could help in a variety of ways: projects can collaborate to increase liquidity within a certain ecosystem, but not only this. Projects on NEAR could advertise on Solana, Ethereum, or any other chain to increase the variety of their user base, and liquidity for their project 🔥

Furthermore, this is not only helpful for projects. Users will have product recommendations that do NOT rely on their socio-demographic information!

This is a paradigm shift compared to Web2 advertising 😍

We want to welcome you to Pr3sence (yes, with a 3 😜) - a privacy-centric tool to deliver targeted ads to Web3 users. Let’s dive into what it does 👇

What it does

Pr3sence is a blockchain-driven ad server.

Essentially, we allow dApps to do two things:

💸 Earn NEAR by hosting relevant ads and displaying them to their user base 📈 Grow their project through targeted ad campaigns

How is an ad served?

Imagine a dApp that wants to host an ad: they can use Pr3sence to rent their website space and serve Web3 ads to their users. Since every dApp on NEAR has a wallet login, we can use this information, stored in the user’s browser, to figure out their wallet address and display the best ad to them.

Our machine learning algorithms will figure out the ad which the user is likely to be most interested in, and once the ad is seen or clicked, the advertiser is charged, and the publisher is credited accordingly.

Advertisers can select different campaign objectives: 'Brand Awareness', where ads are displayed to users that are most likely to pay attention to their ads, or 'Reach', where ads are displayed to maximize the views from a particular user pool, for example, all people who own an ASAC NFT.

Currently, we are going to charge the NEAR equivalent of $0.01 USD for an impression, and $0.20 for a click. These tokens are going to be distributed from advertisers to publishers, and we are going to take a fee from it.

In the future, we plan on greatly expanding these functionalities, making Web3 advertising a reality that is rewarding for everyone 💫

How we built it

⚒️ Pr3sence was built by two developers,

George, our full-stack dev, built the ad server interface using Vue.js & Tailwind CSS on the front end, Express.js on the backend and Mongoose & MongoDB for our database solution.

An important consideration that was made was - how can we serve ads quickly? The answer to this was to use an AWS S3 bucket paired with a CDN service. No matter where you are in the world, each ad image will be delivered to the user with little delay.

When we are charging advertisers for their ad being shown (and crediting publishers), we use the Binance API, to get the current NEAR price, then charge & credit the parties involved accordingly.

For payment, we are using the new NEAR wallet selector functionality, to seamlessly allow top-up and balance withdrawals. 🏦

Edoardo developed the machine learning system to make the best recommendations to the users. We are using hundreds of millions of transactional data entries to identify what your next blockchain interest could be! The ML system is built in Python and queried through a Flask API.

Challenges we ran into

Getting good recommendations is hard, especially when using implicit feedback data such as transactional data. However, after lots of testing, we achieved high accuracy in our machine learning models 🤖

When speaking to NEAR dApps they expressed some understandable assimilations of running ads in the web3 space - due to the previous generation of web2 style ads. From this, we gathered that the ad host needs to have a degree of control over which ads they allow to show, for example, a DeFi project may not want NFT or TradeFi ads to show. We have catered for this & allowed ad hosts to choose which categories of ads to show.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We worked hard on making an intuitive UI that is easy to understand, navigate through and use.
  2. We have spoken to several top projects on NEAR that are both interested in advertising, and hosting ads, and have gotten great feedback to keep improving our product. This is great, as it confirms the need for Pr3sence. Overall, we expect to display ads to over 4 million users. Projects interested in using Pr3sence consist of dApps involved in DeFi, GameFi, Metaverse and NFTs.
  3. Our recommendation system actually makes good recommendations 😉

What we learned

Web3 advertising is possible, and more importantly, there is a desire for this.

Expanding on the above, let’s take two examples: we can allow individual creators of music NFTs to market their projects with any budget. Or, imagine a metaverse game - where in-game, relevant ads can be displayed and interacted with. The realm of applications of Pr3sence is massive.

Web3 users may also find Web2 ads useful. For example, developers on NEAR may find services like Server Hosting helpful for their own projects, or people who want to learn about Rust can be displayed Rust Educational ads. We are planning on integrating, and only approving ads that could be relevant to Web3 users.

An additional point to make is how awesome the NEAR community is during a tough bear market. The support we have received has been overwhelming ❤️ We can't wait to be able to give back to projects and users.

What's next for Pr3sence

This is where it gets exciting. Web2 ads are simply annoying. However, if we can reward users for interacting with our ads - everybody wins. We are planning on doing this through our own tokenomics, built on NEAR. This could be huge for onboarding NEAR users and plan to have a similar operating model to Sweat Economy.

As Pr3sence is composed of a variety of microservices, we also want to allow projects to be able to individually use these.

Our microservices will include:

  • Recommendation System: our recommendation API will allow marketplaces to suggest to users new products based on their transaction history and interest.
  • Customer Segmentation: new projects will be able to access a customer segmentation tool, which will use behavioural scoring and a variety of insights from different types of users such as investment into NFT, GameFi, DeFi and much more.
  • Enhanced analytics: get answers to critical questions for your project. Which projects tend to be more successful on each chain? What is their customer retention? What is the new-to-old customer ratio? And much more.
  • Web2 to Web3 onboarding: tools for identification of web2 users that are likely to be interested in specific web3 projects.

As part of our expansion plans, we want to include:

  • Cross-chain integration: once we demonstrate a working prototype on the NEAR blockchain, we will expand to offer a cross-chain advertisement system. This will allow NEAR advertisers to display ads on Ethereum or Solana, and vice-versa.
  • Metaverse & AR advertisement: ads will be a fundamental part of the Metaverse the AR, the gaming community and more. We are going to provide the infrastructure for this to happen.

Other cool features that we want to include in Pr3sence:

  • Add an ad ban functionality for publishers: this is to remove specific ads or advertisers from their website.
  • Adding user lists for ad targeting: advertisers will be able to target users by wallet address, or behavioural profiles (e.g. Diamond-Hand NFT holders, high-volume traders, etc)
  • And much more…

Finally, we want to get funding to make it an official startup. Funding will allow us to work full-time on this!

If you believe in the next generation of the internet, you should believe in the next generation of targeted media, and the next generation of developers.

Team Pr3sence. Over & out 🤙

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