Scenario: Offline Advertising aka “Spam me Later”

[janl]

A bunch of folks have suggested advertising doesn’t work with offline and hence offline is bound to fail. While I’d suggest we just need to find better business models, I also think ads can be made to work.

1. An app / site can pre-cash a number of ads for rotation.
2. An app / site can collect view and click stats offline and sync them with the backend when online. (this can be subject to tampering, but so is online ad serving, offline is harder to secure, though, I think, but please prove me wrong).
3. “clicking” on an ad doesn’t lead anywhere when one is offline. To allow users to register genuine interest, ads could come with a registration mechanism, or federated like system that syncs with a central source that allows the advertiser to follow up.

This is only one possible solution, there might be grave errors in here, please help pointing them out. And if you can think of other ways to serve ads offline.

Finally, if you have better business models, we’d love to hear about them as well :)

[michielbdejong]

re business models, the more offline your app, the lower your hosting costs (although not your development costs, of course).

i do have a hope that the user will feel more like they "have" the app if it works offline. note that native phone apps have the same problem, and they sure didn't fail because of it. :)

[ghost]

Talking about business models, scenarios where the customer (i.e. advertiser) pays to ensure a certain action (ad display) is performed a number of times and is charged accordingly ( price per engagement ).

If you cache the ads you might be able to display them while offline but it would also require assigning blocks on a per-user basis so that the customer isn't getting more than they paid for to the merchant.

While it technically works, you might end up with blocks that never get used or with an uncertain state. (has the user never opened the app again? long road trip?)

So I think ads are one instance of a situation where communication with other nodes in the network is essential for an efficient, competitive business.