When it comes to online advertising, businesses are forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to “middlemen” in order to reach a captive audience for their promotions. However, the promotions often get placed among many other ads clogging up the space on crowded banners, or simply end up in someone’s spam box. Businesses also have little to no guarantee that the traffic they generate on their promotions is genuine. In fact, nearly 50% of all advertising traffic is generated by bots, essentially defeating the entire purpose of advertising. Sellers pay for “impressions, views, and clicks” resulting in extremely low conversion rates, with only a loose correlation to return on investment. Offline advertising is a similar story. More often than not, offline advertisers promote content with a “hit or miss” mass mailer mentality. Hoards of messages are slammed into users' faces with little or no targeting, resulting in a dubious correlation between offline ad dollars and return on investment. This, along with other factors such as overwhelming volume, contributes to extremely low conversion rates. Promotions are largely delivered to those who simply do not care for the product or whose attention is likely focused on something else.These ineffective measures, both offline and online, negatively impact the whole service value chain. As companies are forced to pay increasing amounts to “middlemen”, such as Google and Facebook, a direct consequence is higher price markup that consumers have to pay for products and services. Businesses end up losing money, and consumers end up paying more for less value, creating a lose-lose situation.In order to counteract these problems, BitClave proposes a system in which the intermediaries are eliminated and interactions are facilitated by the network itself. Instead of paying any “middlemen”, companies automatically make personalized offers directly to consumers based on their explicit search for goods and services using BitClave's decentralized search application.In the BitClave ecosystem, consumers have control over their own data and can choose whether to reveal their identity or personal information to retailers as part of their search. At the same time, retailers respond to these searches with targeted promotions, which consumers are compensated for viewing. The resulting market may incentivize consumers to share some personal information, but this type of sharing is not required for successful search. The ecosystem enables users to control their own privacy preferences, unlike “free” services like Google and Facebook, who often sell user data to brokers.
