ICO Review: Ubex

Ubex is a blockchain-based digital advertising marketplace. Their goal is to make the digital advertising process more transparent, as well as solve other parts they view as pain-points in the advertising industry.

An ETH-based ERC20 token, Ubex has raised 10,313 ETH so far at a hard cap of 24,000 ETH. They’re currently offering a 16 percent bonus sale, which ends in six days. And with a rock-solid white paper, demo, and team, this is an ICO with a lot of promise.

The Pain Points Ubex Looks To Solve

Ubex breaks down their target into three main actors:

For Users

• Advertising is often irrelevant to their tastes.
• The cost of advertising is included due to multiple intermediaries, increasing the price of goods.
• High risk due to scammers using coercive methods.

For Advertisers

• Uncertain results from traditional channels.
• Difficulty in finding appropriate mediums for effectiveness.
• Ineffective campaign strategies, which is only recognized after the fact.

For Publishers

• They need to fill ad slots.
• Have low-earnings since they can’t forecast future payments.
• Also in a high-risk situation as they face nonpayment from dishonest advertisers.

Big Picture Solutions

Ubex looks to solve four primary goals:

1. Automate interactions between advertisers and publishers.
2. Significantly reduces commissions by removing intermediaries.
3. Create an opportunity for publishers to tokenize.
4. Develop a multi-layer system for reputation ranking.

Product Differential For Exchanges

Ubex looks to offer a significant product differential from traditional advertising exchanges through their neural network. Essentially, the goal of this is to maximize purchasing efficiency utilizing an algorithm to process information about each visitor to member networks’ website. This evaluates the interest of a user, calculating the likelihood of success in choosing the right advertisement. Finally, Ubex also notes that a significant differential is their use of blockchain-based smart contracts, minimizing risk by making the relationship between advertisers and publishers as transparent as possible.

How They Help

Advertisers

Ubex aims to help advertisers with three pain-points of digital advertising, including high customer acquisition costs, click fraud, and inefficient targeting.

Customer Acquisition:

Ubex believes that by eliminating the need for a broker, advertisers can save 10-20 percent alone.

Click Fraud:

Pay-per-click has a high risk of fraud as it’s easy to imitate real users and inflate the numbers of clicks. Instead, Ubex plans to utilize a Cost Per Action, such as registering on a website, filling out contact info, clicking “call me back” or purchasing a product. They belief Cost Per Action is much more useful, as it also requires advertisers to be more honest about actions to publishers.

Poor Targeting:

Ubex plans to use neural networks and programmatic algorithms to lead to better targeting in the marketplace.

Publishers

Ubex lists out four points they look to help publishers solve, including:

Efficiency In Purchasing

Ubex looks to maximize revenues of publishers with more effective ad slots. Furthermore, their Cost Per Action model seeks to increase targeting of advertising, increasing the likelihood of successful transactions.

Transparency In Purchases

To reduce the number of bad actors, Ubex’s smart contracts will fulfill every payment on-time, eliminating fraud or late payments.

Tokenization of Advertising

Ubex believes that by being able to forecast future earnings, publishers will be able to tokenize their advertising slots.

Increase In Advertising Traffic

Finally, Ubex looks to increase advertising traffic for publishers by targeting better via their neural networks.

How It Works

Ubex’s structure for end users is relatively straightforward. Here’s a rundown of each sector:

For Advertisers

1. Publishers create an offer and specify what the item is
2. Next, they select a widget or create their own, which identifies the type of company they are.
3. They then select their parameters on a target audience, time of display, geography, and whatnot.
4. Finally, they launch their campaign and monitor results.

For Publisher

1. Publishers register an advertising slot.
2. They then, adjust advertising topic restriction.
3. Next, they specify what geolocation, audience interests, and social parameters are on their publishing site.
4. Finally, they set restrictions on widgets and advertisers.

The Structure

Ubex Platform

The platform is primarily for publishers and advertisers, however, companies that need regression analysis of user data. As  Ubex boasts a behavioral decision-making blockchain, they also enable companies to evaluate user data and make a judgment about the perceived interests of the user.

Ubex Wallet

The Ubex Wallet acts as a payment unit for the Ubex Platform. The UBEX Token will serve as a form of payment for advertising. 5 percent of income from all Ubex transactions will be distributed to the data providers, which they call Ubex Data Mining, or UDM.

The Neural Core

This is the engine of the product, also called Advanced Decentralized Advertising Marketing CORE, or ADAM CORE. I’ll note that the Ubex team does a great job of outlining the complexities in how ADAM CORE works in their white paper, including how it takes the steps of behavioral analysis, making an offer, and tracking the final decision. This is perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of their product and one that could potentially set them apart as a game-changer.

Final Thoughts

With a working demo, well-thought out white paper, and a great team, Ubex is well-worth your time and energy into checking out. They hit a lot of great benchmarks, including a thorough analysis of how their neural network system is going to operate, as well as the potential risks involved. Furthermore, the fact they have a working demo that can scale means less speculation if this ICO will ever become a product. Overall, this a great coin to look into, and one that could potentially grow tremendously much sooner than the current speed for a lot of blockchain projects.