DUBDUB - A NEW DECENTRALIZED PROTOCOL AND dAPP STORE FOR INTERACTIV...

Introduction into Dubdub

Dubdub is the founding member of the IVEP Crypto Association. dubdub is a 3-year old Canadian based technology and content creation company lead by a team of serial entrepreneurs (see the Team Section below). It has been featured by, among others, L’Oréal Paris, Forbes, Metabridge, the Disruptors and was a finalist technology company representing Canada at the French Founders competition in New York. dubdub was also among the startups that pitched at Dx3’s first-ever Retail Innovation Challenge. Early in 2016, dubdub had been awarded funding by the Canada Media Fund through a jury of international industry experts for its innovative technology and business plan but declined such funding.

dubdub has launched an innovative platform for online video together with two products on the App Store and Google Play store: dubsuite (patent-pending), for mobile video editing and dubcandy, for shoppable videos. It has also built a content creation division which provides brands with a unique user generated, crowdsourced content creation system which promotes authentic peer-to-peer marketing. It also offers content creators with an additional source of revenue with affiliate revenue generated from sales made with their own shoppable video content.

A few months after its launch, dubsuite was featured on the App Store as an innovative Canadian mobile application to discover. dubsuite has been used by hundreds of thousand of content creators in various parts of the world and by media companies, such as Huff Post, to create professional looking videos on the fly and cover community events, only with an iPhone.

dubcandy launched on the App Store and Google Play store less than one year ago and is used by thousands of content creators and brands who wish to create unique interactive shoppable videos that can be embedded all across the web

As the web becomes increasingly cluttered with out of touch content, invalid traffic and pointless attention based metrics, advertisers, content creators and publishers struggle to find the proper way to reach consumers. Sensory and content overload make it almost impossible to captivate and monetize audiences looking for targeted experiences.

By introducing the Interactive Video and Experience Protocol (IVEP), we look to reimagine the interactions among the participants involved in the digital experience ecosystem. The IVEP introduces digital layers which sit on top of any streamable content on the Internet and overlays hundreds of new interactive smart objects and functions that can be customized in real time to create the next generation of interactive experiences and significantly increase end user engagement. Nine brands out of ten expect to compete primarily on customer experience rather than price and product as the key brand differentiator. Customer experience is the new battlefield.

The IVEP’s programmable smart and adaptive objects and functions will augment and transform “static” video experiences (legacy) on existing video platforms into powerful and dynamic live engaging systems (next generation). These systems will offer rich interactive and relevant experiences, capture real human engagement and measure performance in a better and more transparent manner.

The IVEP will run with simplicity and ubiquity. Viewers will be unaware of the IVEP’s presence. The participants to the protocol will be able to make any video available online for streaming, including live broadcasting and digital experiences, interactive, shoppable, chat-able, customizable, real-time editable, monetizable, poll-able, actionable, clickable, expandable and searchable, all within the framework of applicable copyright laws. It will make video and digital experiences a lot smarter for, and far more adaptive to, the online ecosystem’s needs for engagement and relevancy with real-time software customization of video content and information. The IVEP introduces a new public platform Application Programming Interface (API) and Software Development Kit (SDK), that also make Artificial Intelligence (AI) an excellent candidate to propel interactive experiences to the next level of smarter human engagement.

The IVEP’s economy will be tokenized and centered around dubtokens. A dubtoken is a multi-faceted unit of account offered to members of the IVEP Crypto Association with various utility, consumptive, trust, governance, transfer, growth incentive and loyalty attributes. Its holder has the right and limited license to use the IVEP protocol together with the underlying services offered by the community through a newly introduced decentralized application store (dApp Store).

Market Pain Points
The broken link between advertisers, publishers and consumers

Advertising runs the Internet, fortunately and unfortunately. Fortunately, because it allows the audience to consume from online publishers a lot of content for free. Unfortunately, because the marketplace has become a terrible mess, ripe with fraud, invalid bot traffic, costly intermediaries, increasing complexity, abuse, lack of trust and privacy, a decreasing quality of the ad content, ineffective adtech, decreasing margins, bad user experience, and a blatant convenient blindness from the audience. Digital advertising is broken in its current form and the industry is now looking to clean up its own mess.

Tackling the ad fraud problem is in the interest of all participants, including online publishers because it will counter effect the year over year slide in revenue per impression and profit margins. There is no consensus on the size of ad fraud and invalid traffic. Figures range between $7 to $16 billions per year, but some are expecting that it will reach $44 billions in unnecessary losses by 20222. In one landmark case, hackers were able to steal $5M/day by faking 300M video views. As part of what White Ops called the Methbot campaign, bots “watched” as many as 300 million video ads a day, with an average payout of $13.04 per thousand faked views. And the fraudsters had their bot army replicate the actions of real people, with faked clicks, mouse movements, etc..

So, it has become an algorithm race between fake traffic bots and bot filters. Buy on a Cost per Click (CPC) and sell on a Cost per thousand (CPM) and you define your breakeven point. Without any real tangible solution, the problem is almost certain to get worse, spreading to even more areas of life as bots are trained to become better at mimicking humans. Given the degree to which product reviews have been swamped by robots (which tend to hand out five stars with abandon), commercial sabotage in the form of negative bot reviews is not hard to predict. Sadly, a lot of media companies and publishers currently lack a serious financial incentive to do anything about it.

Fake followers are also a significant problem with peer-to-peer or influencer marketing, which is becoming increasingly popular. For companies that look to connect influencers to brands, the number of people that an influencer can reach is an important part of the initial pitch. Even if there is no guarantee that a brand’s message will connect with said audience, having a lot of followers at least means that a certain amount of people is going to see it. Fake followers is a growing problem and it will only be addressed if brands start to use and rely on engagement metrics more broadly and move from a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model to a cost per engagement (CPE) model with real human engagement metrics, with or without attribution.

The untapped potential of video content

Current dominant video distribution solutions are arguably unfair to their key stakeholders:

Content creators have little or no control over the monetization model that is used to sell their work. Either way, the revenue they generate will undergo significant taxation by a for-profit entity.
Users have their attention sold for fractions of cents in Audio/Video On Demand (AVOD) models (measured in impressions), while their personal data is mined and sold for profit. In most cases, users are essentially marginalized in the economic equation, under the guise of “free” content and basic service.
Attention marketers (advertisers, sponsors and agents alike) to whom audience is a key metric must trust third-parties for what they buy. Incentives between them are rarely aligned: fraudulent charging mechanisms of traditional platforms not only account for fake traffic, but are also more permissive with fake traffic when audience is being paid for.

In short, participants in the current video distribution and interaction ecosystem are effectively disenfranchised and their interests are often misaligned. Properly incentivizing content creators, developers and publishers for proposing unique viewing experiences to an audience and transparent and verifiable metrics to advertisers will be key to nurturing the future of content consumption.

The IVEP solution
Interactivity as the new standard metric

Attention is not the right metric to determine whether content is being effective or not. Some blockchain-based projects are betting that smarter trackers of user attention data can be monetized with crypto-economics and tokenization. However, we believe this approach is weak because it relies on a premise that attention has the same value as it used to have decades ago. It fails to consider seriously enough that a crucial problem exists with online audience at a global scale: the audience suffers from significant attention deficit4 and “convenience blindness” when surfing the web. It also fails to improve the customer experience which is what businesses and consumers need. At the very least, attention should be better captured and measured through interactive means. “Skip this ad” is now unfortunately one of the most common, straightforward user behavior online. The IVEP will look to replace attention as an intermediary KPI by real intent, engagement and lead conversion.

Two-way interactivity and real-time enhanced experiences are an obvious choice to create a long lasting impact on an audience and trigger actionable behaviors. Real human engagement metrics represent a significant improvement to existing attention based metrics and can warrant a much higher premium for the participants who embrace such an approach. “Real measurable attention” will now be better captured with the IVEP’s programmable smart objects and functions, with richer and addictive features built by the community of developers and designers and with richer experiences offered by publishers to a world who craves for better online video experiences on the decentralized web.

Consumers: the drivers of the advertisement industry

Engaging content and experiences is the biggest driver of “real measurable attention” and brand appreciation. The IVEP will offer the first truly exciting experience for audiences by empowering video content with unlimited interactive features. With a vast catalog of programmable smart objects and functions, publishers will be able to tell better and more captivating stories to their target customers.

We envision a future where, through the IVEP in a single interactive frame, consumers will be able to enjoy “digitally unique” experiences, discover new products and services, shop with one tap, chat with a content creator or customer service, answer polls or donate without ever leaving the viewing experience. Audiences will be able to choose their own storyline, and broadcasters will be able to create pay-by-minute subscription offerings with real time product placement and relevant informative smart objects adapted to their live feed. The brands who embrace the potential of interactive content will undoubtedly have better chances at winning the battle for consumers’ attention.

Viewers will now drive the quality of the content they consume. The IVEP will enable members to act as content reviewers to flag offensive content while brands will be able to conduct A/B testing campaigns remotely and incentivize contributors automatically. Putting the audience in a center position is the only way to recapture attention and foster a successful ad-supported and subscription-based video content distribution ecosystem.

Content Creation As-a-Service

Content creators currently cruelly lack resources to properly monetize the unique experiences they are putting together for their audience. With IVEP, creators will be able to free themselves from the blatant limitations of certain intermediary platforms and profit directly from the sales and viewership of their videos.

New optimized and more transparent business models will emerge from the dubtoken economy. Creators will be able to, among other things:

Create exclusive content for paid subscriptions;
Get paid directly, and automatically share royalties with other rights holders in a transparent manner, upon the sale of items tagged on their content or per any set interactions;
Raise donations directly from their videos;
Receive tips from avid viewers.

IVEP Trust Scores

The IVEP introduces a unique Trust Score for every protocol participant, to measure the behavior of each IVEP identity and determines how likely the “controller” of the ID is to respect the code of conduct and consistently bring value to the protocol.

Trust Scores directly influence the remuneration of each IVEP ID for the use of programmable smart objects and the resulting engagement. They are ratios that incentivize/disincentive the behavior of the participants with respect to the remuneration/cost to partake in the IVEP’s interactions. The scores range from [-100 to +100] and all new identities are initialized with a score of 0 in a tit-for-tat5 reward scheme. Each role in the protocol receives a trust score6.

Over time, scores will be adjusted to reflect how well a given user respects the IVEP code of conduct and how much value such user adds to the protocol. This score can also be increased through user disclosures, token staking and TIPs, as discussed below. The concept of a verifiable trust metric7 for the IVEP actors will combine evidence from various sources to arrive at a degree of belief (Dempster-Shafer Theory8). The belief that an actor is good is the core function that IVEP improves over the incumbent system where trust is controlled by intermediaries.

IVEP dApp Store

The IVEP Crypto Association will introduce a dApp Store on which software developers and designers will offer verified applications, services and templates that will be layered into streamable content to create richer experiences and measure audience engagement. The addition of specific smart objects to content will be registered on-chain, which will keep track of all the parties and objects involved in helping deliver a vast array of interactive services to the audience. Software developers and designers will be highly incentivized by the Association to create thousands of free and paid apps and templates that can be used on the protocol by content creators, publishers, advertisers and retailers. dubdub will be the first developer and contributor to the dApp Store.

IVEP architecture

Dubdub’s contribution

Dubdub is a key player in the e-commerce ecosystem and works with numerous brands, publishers, content creators and reputable online retailers (more than 50 online retailers at time of writing). Recently, it created peer-to-peer marketing campaigns with leading retailers such as Walmart and is integrating dubcandy shoppable video technology with publishers such as shared.com. These ongoing and future partnerships will allow the community of publishers to increase their revenue while creating added value to their audience, and for online retailers to increase their sales.

Token Distribution Event (TDE)
Objectives and sale structure

To fulfill its vision, the IVEP Association will complete a distribution for its dubtokens with contributors and strategic partners worldwide. Achieving the most widespread distribution in light of our contribution goals will be crucial to the future success of the platform. Thus, 1,000,000,000 dubtokens will be created and distributed during the pre-sale and during the public token generation event. A hard cap of USD$30M will be implemented for the totality of the distribution.

The pre-sale will target larger contributors looking to have a greater impact on the development of the IVEP.

Approximately 1 month later, the Association will hold the TDE which will require contributors to register prior to the event. We strongly stand by the principle that the widest distribution will be the healthiest outcome for the protocol’s success.

Token Distribution

Up to 2% Marketing and Bug Bounty: Tokens will be rewarded to influences participating in social media campaign and code auditors.
Up to 4% Advisors: Tokens will be rewarded to members and advisors who are making this project possible. Advisors’ tokens will be locked in a smart contract and will vest over 18 months with a 6 months cliff.
28% dubdub: dubdub’s team, founders and shareholders will share 28% of the tokens, for all of dubdub’s research and development efforts creating and testing the technology and building a broad community of content creators, advertisers, publishers and retailers over the last 3 years and the provisioning of such technology, network and know-how to the Association. dubdub will also provide the dubdub Apps to the protocol. 75% of dubdub’s tokens will be locked in a smart contract and will vest over 24 months.
30% Pre-Sale & TDE: 300,000,000 tokens will be made available in consideration of member contributions during the pre-sale and TDE. The number of tokens available for pre-sale will be capped and will be offered at a 25% discount. The rest will be available to the public. Pre-sale investors will have a lock-up period of 6 months for 50% of their tokens, vesting in equal monthly installments.
36% Reward Engine, Partnership & Adoption Reserve: The reserve will be allocated gradually in weekly installments to developers, designers, content creators, publishers and partners who demonstrate a clear intention and ability to develop the platform and promote the protocol, as further indicated in the whitepaper. Up to 5% of the reserve will be airdropped to content creators, publishers and partners of the dubdub platform to kick-start the content creation and adoption of the protocol.

Road Map