Why Brands Are Advertising on Crypto-Driven Search Engine Presearch

Crypto-driven search engine Presearch has been on a growth curve since launch in 2017. Now, it's rolling out a new version of its advertising platform with features that permit a higher volume of user searches—and ultimately make a play for brands' SEO budgets. Similar to Google’s ad ecosystem, where advertisers pay dollar amounts to run ads, Presearch is a decentralized search engine built on a blockchain network where advertisers purchase PRE, Presearch’s cryptocurrency, to run ads. Unlike Google, Presearch does not track people, profile them or store any of their search queries. However, brands like Charles Schwab, QuickBooks/Intuit, Adidas, Airbnb, Travel Alaska and American Airlines are using this search engine to place ads where they can track ad views and clicks through a dashboard. “The vision is to build an open and transparent search engine that functions more like a public utility where everyone can participate,” said Presearch founder Colin Pape. Presearch’s privacy-centric search engine, that rewards people and advertisers in crypto, offers an alternative search engine to Google—increasingly under regulatory pressure from all sides. Elsewhere, alternative search engines like Neeva are also picking up interest. But there's a long road ahead. Presearch has 3.8 million registered people with close to 150 million monthly searches, a fraction of Google’s 100 billion monthly searches. By moving into a mainnet environment, where the blockchain is fully developed and cryptocurrency transactions are verified and recorded, the decentralized network will now process over 5 million daily private searches—with the ability to scale to hundreds of millions. How an advertiser bids with a PRE token Keyword optimization or search engine optimization (SEO) is a basic tenet of digital marketing. Presearch, too, relies on keyword optimization but differs from the traditional keyword ads method used by Google. This platform's dashboard lets advertisers buy PRE tokens, currently around $0.10 for each unit of PRE. The minimum cost for an ad is 100 PRE, but the final cost is determined by an auction process. Presearch also rewards its users with a PRE for every search query. On Presearch's dashboard, an advertiser can choose from a list of 8,600 keywords to allocate their PRE token against an ad, where the highest bidding advertiser gets their ad displayed on the top of the search engine. However, there is no actual cost per click on the traffic that advertisers get. Instead, a method that the company calls 'keyword staking' lets advertisers pledge their tokens against specific words. For example, an advertiser chooses the keywords “shopping bag,” stakes PRE tokens against those words and creates an ad that links to a website. For a shopper who searches “shopping bag,” Presearch's ad server finds ads where the advertisers have used the exact term and will sell the ad to the highest PRE token bidder. Cash, Credit or Crypto? Why Digital Currency Is an Inevitable Payment Option “It's of very high value and there's a lot of visibility to that placement,” said Pape, who is exploring partnerships with existing advertising networks like ad.net, as well as media agencies. “Traditionally, [the ad networks] have not focused on privacy,” he said. “That’s the biggest challenge, to find an ad network that also respects user privacy.” How platform users generate crypto tokens The company is in the early stages of monetizing its audience, but has funded operations and generated revenue by pre-selling PRE advertising credits through a community crowd sale. Presearch now lets advertisers redeem previously bought PRE tokens on the platform to buy ads. But using PRE tokens is not limited to Presearch. People can withdraw the token from the platform to an exchange to sell it for other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, or hold it in an external wallet. Presearch outranks its competitors with a reward system—each time someone searches on the platform they are rewarded with a PRE token. “It’s about trying just to build usage of the search engine and drive more queries that can be monetized,” Pape said. Currently, the decentralized infrastructure consists of 65,000 community member nodes or software that is used to process the search queries. The people who operate these nodes earn a small piece of PRE token on every successful query. Most of these node operators are from the U.S. and Canada, where 60% of the search engine’s traffic comes from. Google Expands Verification Process for Financial Service Advertisers But as the company moves from a testnet (early testing) environment to a mainnet (production) environment, it plans to expand its geographic distribution to Germany, Singapore and Frankfurt. Moving to mainnet also lets Presearch distribute the network out around the world, instead of having it hosted in a single location—making it faster and more responsive for searchers as a result of close proximity to Presearch. “Instead of a few companies acting as gatekeepers controlling information access for the whole world, Presearch is pioneering a better future where search algorithms can be built and run openly by anyone—vetted by everyone—and where choice and control are given back to those using the search engine,” said Trey Grainger, Presearch CTO.