Reggie Jareth on Gather Network's creator monetization and cloud computing

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with reggie jareth ceo and founder of gather network reggie welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks ashton it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me on you're very welcome let's dive straight

0:19into it blockchain solutions disrupting many many industries gather network doing the same with advertising cloud so many more faucets that you're diving into let's start off our conversation by just giving an overview from yourself on those solutions that gather network is building and how it's going to affect the industry and then we'll dive into the details

0:41for sure so gather was founded with a basic try to solve a basic pain point which was you know finding another way for content providers for websites to make money right everyone from most content providers use advertising and game developers which is not the best way given the current issues that exist with it so while in 2018 or so founder gather with the simple idea of

1:04providing you know an alternative form monetization and how it works back then was very simple you'd visit a site you provide your consent and a very small portion of your spare computing power is being used to secure the blockchain right i actually discovered something called coin hive back then and for those not familiar it was being used by pirate bay

1:24to monetize their their site that idea in itself trade trade processing power for revenue is genius i was like this is amazing it can scale but the way pirate bay implemented it wasn't going to be okay i'd work with publicist group for a while which was a major advertising company i think right now that the biggest and so i knew that you know major publishers major website providers

1:46content providers they're not going to be okay with you know without the bells and whistles so that's when we brought the team together added all the required features and we built you know version one back in 2018 now it's very very different we have three products and services so we have gather online the alternate form of monetization for publishers and

2:06developers or app developers etc we have gather cloud we have gathered enterprise gather online is you know again you visit a website you provide your consent and then a very small portion of your computing power has been used to secure the blockchain and subsequent coins attached to blockchain as well our blockchain the amount of processing power that's used is negligible you

2:28won't notice that it uses less than what than viewing a video ad right so it's completely like that there's no no you can't notice anything gather cloud is what we do with a lot of the spare capacity is we reset it on to enterprises and developers as well as a cheaper cost of cloud computing or decentralized cloud computing our strategy there is very simple you have a

2:50lot of centralized and decentralized cloud providers already but there's a lot of nice services that aren't being provided and that's how we're developing them right now and then adding on the fact of decentralization and the cost savings is proving to work for all the pocs we've been doing and then we have gather enterprise we know this especially now you have a lot of you

3:08know large companies looking at blockchain you have so many various different options people don't know how you can actually implement blockchain or crypto into your existing businesses right so enterprise gather enterprise is put up into two different departments one is the incubation aspect and then there's the larger sales aspect so we help large companies

3:28Consult with them provide custom solutions for them to come on the blockchain our blockchain etc it could be so i can cite an example of our latest contractors we have built a pos software for a bunch of cannabis dispensaries out of 12 cannabis dispensaries out of new york so they can you know bank retail users instead of having to work with

3:49cash they can use pos debit card credit card etc which is a major pain point for them right so that same solution can be ported to launch dramatics car washes it's anything that's cash intensive very simply over so that's an example of how gather enterprise works for these large organizations on the incubation side you always have developers

4:08Somewhat inexperienced people with crypto looking to launch their own companies etc so they need expertise they need help so that's what we do we help with economics design tech capital etc and yeah so you have this you know three different departments or three different areas of services and products great thank you for the explanation reggie that really helps lay out the

4:30whole playing field now i want to dive back into the first category that you mentioned about the monetization and just the network i'm curious from the perspective of like a content creator or you know a blogger somebody who is used to monetizing their content with advertisements can you walk them through how they would benefit from using gather

4:52instead there's it depends on how they just want to implement it see we don't tell content creators that hey you need to only use gather and not ads so you will have content creators that will run ads their existing monetization methods and they will also use gather because it's just free money for them right that's option a option b is people just remove ads

5:13and just using gather on top and that has a lot of ux benefits because you're not bombarding your users with ads right it's unnoticeable after you after you opt in it's a very clean for monetization here and then obviously it can be used for other ways such as subscriptions pay walls etc right instead of having people pay direct cash you do this etc in terms of

5:33implementation it's really really straightforward you sign up at online.gather.com now i'm gonna put a new website there's gonna be a manual review that happens to make sure you're following all the rules within your jurisdiction so you know we're very of certain websites that we have blocked and do not accept them because we're giving them a

5:50way to make money right once you're in the once you're accepted which takes about 24 hours for an approval at this at this stage it's just a code snippet and you put that on the back end of your website or app once that's released and that's it's running then we have premium features that are coming up right now it's a standard consent banner for your

6:09regular websites large marquee clients we develop custom banners etcetera colors for the brand colors etc premium features will include you know regionalization of languages changing the brand in terms of colors sizes so they can play around with it and then if they want to have custom messages as well very cool reggie and i feel like there's been this ongoing trend increasing of

6:30content creators and influencers that are working on platforms and you know they have to pay more and more to get access to their audience or you know if you're not paying for advertising you almost get no organic traction and it you know that sort of ties into the fact that everyone feels like they are the product and you know they're being used by these social media

6:52platforms to take advantage of them have you noticed this trend and like the increase in interaction for gather network and alternative solutions for monetization you know over the past coming years as you've been building off the platform for sure so when i was working with publishers group i was on a bunch of different teams and that's when i first

7:14noticed this and you know that's saying that it is not for free then you are the product as you were saying and from targeting to the data collection that went on you saw this happening and then within the analytics i had access to because i had a range of different things i could use you could see that you know if you weren't paying for some form of

7:31advertising the organic reach on multiple platforms social media as an example were just dropping right the amount of views that were happening per scroll is just going down and down that's because the algorithms on the back end were forcing you to make paid decisions here so you know they improve their profit margins and over the years it's become just much worse and worse

7:47because you're having data that's being sold i mean i'm sure it must have happened to you or multiple people you talk about a product or service and then boom you see an ad on google somewhere no one likes that you know who's listening to you that's horrible so yeah you have people come to us for a lot of different reasons one is they don't want to disturb their their

8:06users two is they just want to make more money three is we don't collect data right we're not collecting who you are or what gender you are or anything like that in fact it's the opposite we as content creators you can reward your users you can share your revenue with them so that ensures or helps stickiness with staying on your site right definitely and i'm curious on you know

8:30the differences in revenue generation that content creators i don't know if you have any of this background information but like if content creators are using advertising you know if they switch together will they be using less will they be earning less money or does that and how much it does it depend on the size of their following that they

8:48have for their content so if we look at standard right so i mean their cpm and their cpc like cost per click and cost per mile which is basically per thousand impressions right and how it works with gather it's basically on time spent so when you're on it let's say reddit.com it's how many ads you view right so you're incentivized to view more and more ads

9:09rather than content with us it's about time spent there so the longer your sessions are the more the creator will earn so that again incentivizes more quality content for people to stay on there so sites like streaming sites earn a lot more compared to sites where people are just coming and bouncing which has you know their own issues i don't have those numbers offhand

9:32last one we did calculations because it is tied to token price and then the amount of users in the total platform as well and then on the supply demand side as well but i mean last time we did these calculations it was you know proving to be more profitable than ads compare in your general ad payouts so not like niche area so if you're talking about

9:54something like crypto ads for example those are very very expensive so that will probably pay more than gathered but if you're talking about very simple things toothbrushes toothbrush ad ads sorry yeah we'll pay more i think it was about 1.4 x more or something along that and then as the scales as you get more users as a token performance improves they get paid more

10:14But again then you have people who just don't care about their audience because they're so sticky and they just do both definitely thanks for that reggie and you we've been talking a lot about the cryptocurrency and the blockchain and how you're able to accumulate it can you talk about the functionality you know once you have the token are the

10:35creators to sell it off or do you use it for governance staking other defy how does that work for sure so i mean it's a governance token it's used as a form of gas within the network itself so many transaction on the main net requires gather yes there's native staking as well that i mean just taking on centralized exchanges and some there's some other

10:53features coming out so it's a payment rail within the ecosystem as well so for example premium features you need to pay in gather tokens or you can paint gather tokens and have a discounted rate for it there's some d5 features coming up with some of the incubation projects so it's going to be used as collateral for a under collateralized stable sorry over

11:13collateralized stable coin and it doesn't does a lot of you it's basically the base glue and layer that's needed there but yes majority of i'm not gonna say majority at this stage right now but a lot of people are holding but eventually yeah creators will be using this to sell off and that's where our tokenomics time right one side is supply and one size demand

11:34and the demand side then picks up the cell pressure essentially definitely and you know with these three business units that we talked about in the beginning are you growing all of those simultaneously or are you really seeing a lot of growth in one section specifically online basically sells itself we don't need direct marketing we might do some

11:56media buying etc to gain more customers but it's a solution that's unique right in terms of scale et cetera so that really sells itself and we have referral programs so users come there pretty quickly that just needs enhancements in terms of added functionality and stuff like that going forward when we talk about cloud that's reaching a stage once we have

12:17about seven or eight different services within the cloud itself so we have about three live right now and we're looking to put three or four more in and then we're going to start actually monetizing that's three of services so we have what's called a file transfer service containers as a service and a runtime environment which is running well live right now the file transfer

12:35service is very simple it's essentially in large organizations think of a company with 50 000 employees or more they have to transfer a 50 tv file or 5 tb file from let's say marketing invoice from marketing all the invoices for the year to finance right that's a lot of files usually you're going to use an external server to do that and that costs money

12:53using our software that we've developed they will use the internal pcs that are not being used at that time by employees let's say people have gone home for the day that's going to use that capacity that computing power storage and then move it across within the enterprise so what happens here is it's faster because it's within the enterprise and it saves

13:12on cost because you're not using a third party to such as google to transfer these files and then you have the other two services as well once we have a couple more that'll be monetized and gather enterprise is in revenue right now so that's that's a department that's based on fiat revenue which the fiat revenue is in use for buyback and burns

13:30Of the main gather token and not any secondary tokens and that's doing well because we're seeing there are people smes to large organizations who are want to explore blockchain who are looking to get into it but they just don't know how to do it and the incubations they just there's a lot of people wanting to do their own projects or do different

13:49things so that is picking up i would say in terms of what's scaling the fastest or growing the fastest is definitely online i would say then enterprise both are in revenue and then cloud because not monetize it i couldn't comment on that right definitely great information reggie thank you so much and with online what are you mentioned you were

14:10hinting at some premium features and i'm curious on like the next steps and stages in the coming months and months on how you're planning to grow that out after we have the premium features there's a lot of different user requests we get so one one feature we're really looking at which is that kind of highlighting for reasons people want some form of user data

14:33basically opt-in rates or another way of providing consent so this is we're going to deliberate about this over the next couple of months especially about the consent mechanism and the rest is just scale it's it's just about you know the whole back end's been built it's ready for scale it's just acquiring more and more customers our target for the end of not well year

14:53from when it was went on live is about 100 000 publishers and right now we're about 700 or 800 within a month or so for being live amazing and if there are more publishers or content creators or just users that want to learn more about this monetization network and get involved and earn revenue what is the best way for them to learn more online.gather.network

15:16amazing thank you so much reggie i really appreciate you taking the time to come on i will leave those links to all the business units and the online in the description box below all the best with everything moving forward and let's follow up in the near future perfect thank you so much ashley it was a pleasure you