Hello!
Ever made regrettable purchases from Instagram on a late weekend night? Today’s guest may have played a role in it.
Antonio García Martínez was part of the team that helped Facebook build its ad engine. He is the author of Chaos Monkeys—a beautiful memoir of how the startup ecosystem used to be in the early 2010s and what it took to survive it. He was also a former advisor to Twitter.
The Internet had more users before it had a clear business model. Up until late 2011, Facebook did not have a clear mechanism to attribute purchases to its users. Advertisements subsidised the cost of the Web. Web3, in contrast, works in the opposite direction.
We have had clear business models but a lack of users. Our podcast today explores the reasons why and how advertisements could evolve to look within Web3.
Web3 ads? What are those? An ugly banner in the metaverse? An NFT? An airdrop? They are all ads. What matters is, does the user convert?
Here’s a quick fact for you. One of the largest referrers to GMX, the perp exchange, is CoinGecko. The price tracking site. In what looks like a beautiful match between a Web2 business that has millions of users and an on-chain primitive with millions of dollars flowing through it, GMX is able to clearly track how much value CoinGecko has sent towards it. Ads in Web3 are a function of attribution.
Since on-chain transactions are public, it should be relatively easier to verify which source’s traffic is sending the right kind of user. Ideally, one should be able to know whose traffic produces the highest revenue.
Antonio’s latest startup, Spindl, aims to solve this problem. It may seem far-fetched, but to me, the vision sounds as big as building Google’s ad-network. Don’t take our word for it. Spindl is already fuelling monetisation for a number of wallet interfaces.
Tune in to our latest episode for some distilled wisdom on what it takes to survive market cycles, the need to have conviction, and why advertisements are here to stay.
Signing out,
Saurabh
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