At the beginning of this week, Leofinance launched its new interface on the main website (previously accessible on the alpha subdomain).
With it, a number of updates were rolled out, among them being the native Leofinance advertisements, which should be included among the regular #threads.
I've read or heard Khal say there should be 1 every 10 regular threads.
Well... I haven't found any, and I looked for them on purpose. I also asked my co-national @acesontop, and he says he doesn't see any ads on Brave, but these should be native to Leofinance and probably not caught by the Brave shields, if I'm right. I used Firefox.
The reason I asked Adrian if he saw any was to check if the ads are geo-targeted. I'm not convinced, since he said he doesn't see any ads at all, not necessarily on Leofinance.
It might be a bug or they might be geo-targeted, or there might be something else.
But this is a point I was trying to get to regarding advertising on Web3 versus Web2.
In Web2, geo-targeted ads are almost the norm. And ad tariffs are based on the tier of the countries you want to target.
It's one price to target the US, Western Europe, and a few other well-developed countries with the same "profile" of users, it's another (lower) to target Eastern Europe, and probably another to target Africa or South America.
I believe geo-targeting still has a reason to be used in some situations:
- when advertising physical locations
- when distribution networks and logistics are a factor
- when advertising regional websites, particularly written in a language not spoken by many worldwide
Worldwide websites, written in English or with multilingual support, should move toward a new way of targeting who they advertise to, in my opinion.
In Web3, location becomes much less important than in Web2.
What is added in Web3 and is not taken advantage of (for advertising at least), is the financial aspect, which is generally public information (hmm!).
If we are talking about a worldwide website and services, why would it matter if a customer is from the US, China, or Venezuela? For Web3 reasons, it doesn't matter at all. For compliance reasons with the restrictive legislation in each of those countries, it might still matter.
For Web3, what matters is the stake of the account. And its reputation, where appliable.
What is the reason advertisers promote online to potential customers of top-tier countries, even when geo-location is not relevant? Because they convert those ads into sales easier since the audience has more money to spend online, on average. Or at least that's the reason I could find.
But the internet is borderless. One way to gauge someone's likelihood to spend money in Web3 is by his account stake on the platform where the ad is placed.
This could work for Leofinance ads in the future. Since reputation has a meaning on Hive (even if it isn't a great metric), this can be used as a filter too.
From the user's side, maybe a user should need a minimum $LEO stake (not too high) if he or she wants ads disabled. The incentive is, that once he or she is a stakeholder, the user will receive a share of the ad revenue, That's a reason to keep ads on. And if that's not a strong enough reason, maybe ad revenue should be distributed only to stakeholders who didn't turn ads off. Turning them back on would make them eligible for ad revenue sharing again.