Why the internet needs Zohem

Internet advertising is a 200Bn USD industry globally, 74% of the industry and 99% of the annual growth of the industry is eaten by 2 companies, namely google and facebook, why so, because they govern the primary currency of the economy, which is user behaviour data. A huge chunk of this data doesn’t belong to them, but to the publishers on whose site this data is generated, but google and facebook also have access to this data because they have some form of their widgets or SDKs (of like or adsense ads or analytics) installed on most of the websites on the internet.

Now, data can’t be monetised in silos, ie. if i as a publisher, have access to only the data of my website and i try and monetise it , it’ll have negligible value, because it is insufficient data about every user, but if someone has access to all my activity data and that of everyone on the internet, then it is fruitful/possible to monetise it , ie. how google and facebook are able to monetise it. And now, because they are the only ones who have access to that data, they have been able to attract the largest set of advertisers in world, and now because these 2 have access to the largest set of advertisers, they act monopolistically and charge an extremely high commission rate for advertising on publisher’s sites, while giving them a very small percentage.

This creates a market with negligible competition, where, publishers get an unfairly small chunk of what the advertiser pays and the advertiser pays an amount much greater than what he could have paid in a competitive market. 3rd party platforms that facilitate buying and selling of ad inventory, at much lower (and transparent) commissions have existed for over for more than 6 years now, called as Real Time bidding exchanges, but none has been able to challenge the duopoly.

Now these exchanges, have attracted huge publisher interest, in hope of lower commission rates, but very little advertiser interest, this is because, advertisers do not just need ad inventory to bid on , but user behaviour data to make confident ad buying decisions, but this quantum of data, is only aggregated by Google and Facebook and neither by any 3rd party nor the publisher’s themselves.

So, we at Zohem, are trying to create a community owned database of user behaviour data, which once made, will make ad buying and selling transactions to happen on transparent exchanges, which charge much less commissions, saving billions of dollars for advertisers and increasing billions of dollars in revenues for publishers who do the bulk of the hard work of creating content and engaging users. Hence Zohem.