Interview with Nic Hodges

So the very quick recap is really, first off, explaining what blockchains are. A lot of people have heard of Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses blockchains, but essentially a blockchain is really just a database. It's a database that's been designed and built to work really well on the Internet, so we can distribute it onto lots of computers, we have a lot of security, and we can essentially be really sure about the data that we're starting to look at in those databases. So the application of that for media is really interesting, and today I talked about three sort of applications, the first being micro-payments. So as we read a piece of content, as we watch a video, with blockchains, people can start paying tiny amounts not just for a single article, but perhaps chunk by chunk as they read it, or minute by minute as they watch a video, they can be paying tiny fractions of a cent, and because of the way that blockchains work, that can all happen, and there's no sort of payment costs like at the moment really stops publishers from charging to read an individual article. So the second area I talked about was ad tech, and again, using blockchains to provide that sort of database layer of, when someone reads a piece of content, the server that's giving them that content sort of says, hey, I need an ad, and rather than using traditional ad tech for that, we actually again use blockchains. So the server asking for the ad does that by a blockchain, the server sends an ad back, it also sends payment immediately for that ad, and then that gets delivered to the user. And then the third piece I talked about was user data. So the idea of giving users more control over the data that they share with advertisers, and also control about how much advertising is paying for their content. So if we have a world of micro payments, perhaps I'm happy to pay for 50% of my content, but I want ads to pay for the other 50%. And the system that we've sort of started designing, and I've been thinking about, really starts to give people a lot more visibility over what that is. So about $20 worth of content, or about $20 worth of advertising pays for our content every month, and no one really knows that. So the way that we're looking at it, we're trying to give people more visibility of that and understand that they wanna slide that slider down and see half the number of ads they're gonna have to pay $10 a month for the content that they consume. So just to understand correctly, who are the ones who owns the data in the end? Is it blockchain? Is it the media itself? Yeah, well, there can be multiple blockchains. I mean, there can be lots of different databases. The way that I've sort of been thinking about it, publishers can really run their own blockchain, which does that payment sort of piece. There could be a whole ad tech sort of blockchain that all the ad tech companies work into, or perhaps there's a group M blockchain. And group M controls their own blockchain and asks all the ad tech companies to work with that. And again, on that user data side, there's a lot of really great startups that are working on that challenge, working on single sign-on sort of systems, a way that I can prove that I am who I say I am anywhere in the world using a blockchain. So I haven't really been looking at designing those systems because there's some really smart people doing that and I'm gonna rely on them for that one. So for the ones who are exploring this, what kind of advice would you give them in basically starting up? Yeah, look, I think we're still very early in this technology. Most people in technology sort of understand that blockchains are gonna have a big impact on our world. We're still at that phase of working out what that impact looks like. So, and I said on stage today, I think in five years, every person here who's working for a brand or working in an agency will be using some sort of technology that uses blockchains. What we have to do now though is work out how we get to that point in five years. So it's really a lot of experimentation. I've been working a lot on sort of building prototypes with publishers, with ad tech companies, with agencies. And it's really still this process of learning really and that's gonna happen for the next two or three years, I think, before we really start to get scalable sort of enterprise level uses of blockchains in this industry. So you already touched upon it, but if you look into the future, how does it look like in regards to blockchaining, in regards to how media basically live and breathe, are able to do it at least? Yeah, look, there's two parts to that. One is that in five years, it will be completely different. In five years, if we're suddenly trading media and user data and payment for content on a blockchain, that's a fundamental change from how things are right now. But at the same time, it won't look that different because blockchains are just gonna be this sort of data technology that sits under services that will continue to look and feel exactly like they do now. Like that micro payments example, it's completely invisible. It's a browser plugin or it's an application and as you start reading content, you're paying tiny bits of that content. You never hit a button to say, okay, start paying. So in actual fact, in five years, blockchains may have had a huge impact on how we look at content, how we advertise in content, how we pay for content. But at the same time, to the average person and to even people in agencies and advertisers, things probably won't look that different at all. Just one more question. Because you've in some way given advice to the media companies in some sense, but what do you think is going to be important for brands and companies that will be a part of this system? Yeah, look, for brands, there's a lot of challenges that brands have right now around digital. Things around viewability, things around brand safety, things around ad fraud, which is a huge issue. Blockchains can really start to solve all those types of problems. So we can verify using a blockchain, brands will be able to know in real time exactly where their ads are running, what sites they're on, what type of content. So they can be sure of that brand safety. We can use blockchains to do viewability in real time so brands can know how many seconds of their ad is being watched by people. And they can start to see that straight away. So the benefits for brands are really in those sort of areas that I think at the moment are some of the biggest challenges they've got. Thank you so much.