Positive Sum
Advertising model where all participants benefit - advertisers, publishers, and users alike
Traditional Background
Traditional advertising often felt zero-sum - advertisers paid to interrupt users, who generally wanted to avoid ads. While publishers benefited financially, the adversarial nature of advertising created inefficiencies and user experience friction.
Web3 Evolution
Web3's transparency creates opportunities for genuinely positive-sum advertising. When advertisers can target precisely, publishers receive fair compensation, and users discover relevant products, everyone wins. This contrasts sharply with quests models where users are paid to engage artificially.
Zero-Sum Characteristics
Zero-sum or negative-sum advertising includes quests (users paid for fake engagement), KOLs (expensive with unmeasurable results), memecoin gambling ads (harmful to users and publishers), and aggressive retargeting (annoying users with irrelevant ads).
Positive-Sum Characteristics
Positive-sum advertising features behavioral onchain targeting that matches users with relevant products, native ads that enhance rather than interrupt, CPTx billing that aligns advertiser costs with actual value, and onchain verifiability that ensures all parties get what they expect.
Long-Term Impact
Positive-sum advertising creates sustainable ecosystems where advertising is seen as valuable rather than annoying. This benefits all participants long-term and enables higher-quality publishers, better-funded advertisers, and happier users who discover products they actually want.