umm gbye AdSense 👋
The Modern Billboard Collective debrief
What if there was a decentralized alternative to AdSense that was owned and operated by the network of websites that use it?
What if you could own digital real estate on your favorite websites?
What if you could advertise on them?
What if you could fund your startup while aligning your community with your upside?
koodos came together with Starupy & Coinvise and other internet friends to reflect on these questions. The result was The Modern Billboard Collective – a network of startups trying to shepherd an alternative to centralized “digital real estate” services or Ad Network monopolies.
We’ve started to see that digital real estate can be very valuable. Many of the “Metaverses” raise capital via land sale - Decentraland’s total land value is over $743M:
But why start a website for the sole purpose of selling pixels on the lottery chance that it succeeds when we could apply the same logic to existing digital real estate?
In the physical real estate business, it is well known that value is driven primarily based on location, location, location! Invest in a thriving neighborhood and reap the upside.
The same logic applies in digital spaces - and it’s more than just domain squatting. Buying ‘real estate’ on a startup’s website could be the equivalent of investing in a property in an up-and-coming neighborhood.
In web3, we’ve become used to blurring lines - mostly it’s been around blurring the lines between consumption and investing. Here, we’re seeing a blend between real estate investing and advertising.
So for now The Modern Billboard Collective is an experiment by a group of startups selling ad space on their websites. But we believe that there’s potential for this to steamroll into a major public good that could replace Ad Network monopolies.
We’ve added a billboard to koodos!
VIEW THE BILLBOARD
In layman’s terms, this means you can buy and own a square lot on a billboard that will be permanently hosted on our site. As a lot owner, you can upload an image and link out to a URL of your choice.
The cool part is that because we’re still brand new, you can buy a lot today, hold it for months or years, and sell it in the future. That "digital real estate" should (in theory) get more valuable over time as we grow.
Get the feel-good vibes of patronage + the utility of advertising + the upside potential of angel investing.