Recently, we became aware of a bottleneck. As the activity on LeoThreads soared - especially during special events when people were incentivized to be active on the platform - a couple of issues were revealed.
The first one was desired. To push the limits of the platform until it breaks somewhere. And that happened, on multiple occasions. That gives the developers the information needed to see where the limitations are and what they have to change to scale up.
The other issue that showed up was regarding advertising. It appears the crypto-friendly networks used to distribute ads ran out of them in some instances, displaying standard placeholders instead. Obviously, the placeholders don't pay anything. I haven't seen one, but I assume it's the kind of placeholder that invites the viewer to click to place an ad there.
Now, the team decided to add Google Adsense to fill in the gap. Obviously, Adsense never runs out of ads and they have very targeted ads. I've expressed some concerns about the ability to keep going with Adsense, in Threads. But it's done, so let's leave it like that.
Let's look at this from a different angle.
We now have huge advertising networks on the internet, so huge that they can greatly influence the directions of development and the measures taken by the websites they are involved in.
Let's remember Twitter lost powerful advertisers when Elon Musk took over for no other reason than he becoming the new boss at Twitter.
From what I know - without being very interested in the subject - Twitter is still struggling to get some of them back, which is the reason given for hiring the new CEO.
But at the same time, Elon Musk is pushing Twitter hard in a different direction, where the company will not depend as much on advertising, and more on other sources of revenue (which may become dominant in the future).
But let's step back from what's going on at Twitter and get back to Leofinance.
I've heard Khal talk about an internal ad system (kind of decentralized in moderation, from my understanding), and I believe that's the future for Leofinance advertising. Everything else, whether crypto-friendly advertising networks or Adsense (or even nothing), should probably be an intermediary step.
All big social media platforms have in-house ad systems, so in order to aspire to be a relevant social media platform, Leofinance will need to have one too.
The question is when should this in-house system be launched.
Launch it too soon and the platform won't be big enough to attract advertisers through the in-house ad system.
Launch it too late and you won't say loud enough you mean business.
Personally, I'd rather want to see the in-house ad system be added sooner than later. And I don't think the team wants to postpone this too much either, by listening to Khal. He seems pretty excited about what they are building.
And the opportunity I talk about in the title... While this is not like the time when Web2 arrived, the fact that crypto-friendly advertising networks are not yet very established is an opportunity to become an important player in this area.