SnippetMEdia introduces blockchain technology in PH digital media landscape

Superiex Vice President Jiongye Wu, SnippetMEdia’s VP for Strategy and Operations Shyne de la Vega, and SnippetMEdia COO Martin Cerantonio formally seal their strategic partnership of introducing blockchain technology in digital media practice in the Philippines

Valued at USD$168 Billion, Bitcoin has dominated headlines on investment for most of the last few months for good reason – enough to become nearly synonymous with the whole of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

And while it’s true that Bitcoin is the first, the biggest, and the most noteworthy of the cryptocurrencies, it’s not the only way to invest in this space and definitely not the only way to invest in the technology that has enabled Bitcoin to gain this much attention.

Block. Chain.

The innovation that everyone should understand about Bitcoin is the blockchain. These concepts are separate things, but the blockchain is what powers Bitcoin as a currency, as well as around 1,500 other variants that sprung up since 2009 when it all began.

At its heart, a blockchain is a record of transactions, like a ledger book or an Excel sheet. These transactions can be anything, from a purchase at a supermarket or an ID number.

Today, transactions are verified by a central authority like a government or a bank. Blockchains are designed to replace these centralized systems with decentralized ones, where the verification comes from thousands of volunteer computers (called nodes) around the world that come to an agreement on which transactions are valid.

The network is automatically informed whenever someone makes a transaction, prompting the computers to run complex computations to determine if the transaction is valid. If it is, they create a block and a public log of what actually changed, when and how. 

The “chain” refers to how a block is linked to the block that came before it, creating a chain of blocks: a blockchain. Since the transactions all reference the one before them, a person can figure out which ones came first, thus ordering them chronologically.

The chain could also refer to how secure a blockchain is. It is virtually tamper-proof since blocks are interdependent: editing a block will invalidate all blocks that came after it.

Also, all the computers participating in a blockchain keep a copy of the public ledger. If you want to manipulate it, you need to change the record on all the computers at once. This is a feat that is significantly more difficult than hacking a normal database, and no one has managed to come close to ever hacking a blockchain.

SnippetMEdia: The new chain in the block:

The ability to share a trusted public ledger that everyone can inspect but which no single user controls allows people who have no particular confidence in each other to collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority. Simply put, as the Economist eloquently described it, “it is a machine for creating trust.”

None is trust more critical than in the business of content. The media industry is currently encountering the lowest level of trust in its history. In amidst perennial issues like fake news that has been exacerbated by social media, unfair and inexistent wealth distribution to content producers are now also becoming common practices.

Superiex Chairman & President Bruce Liu, SnippetMEdia's head of legal and accounting Atty. Cherry-Amor Chao, and SnippetMEdia COO Martin Cerantonio formally seal their strategic partnership of introducing blockchain technology in digital practice in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, brands are dealing with a frustrating environment that has steadily eroded the value they get from digital advertising. This includes ad-bot scams and hacks that create fake traffic and clicks. Worse is the dominance of sheer traffic over quality content that hooks readers in and entice them to return for more.

After a year providing curated content to over 800,000 users on iOS and Android, SnippetMEdia has stepped up to take on the challenges plaguing both content creators and advertisers by launching the SnippetMedia Blockchain – the first blockchain media platform in the Philippines.

In partnership with Superiex, a China-based digital asset trading platform, SnippetMEdia will establish a first-of-its-kind ad platform built upon a blockchain. Advertisers need to purchase tokens from Superiex to participate and post campaigns secured by Smart Contracts, a special digital contract that executes its terms when specified conditions are met.

With the use of Smart Contracts, the SnippetMEdia Blockchain will ensure that its advertising partners get unprecedented clarity and transparency on the performance of their campaigns and access to more granular analytics. The goal? Give more value for their ad spend by using an efficient, smarter and trustworthy system to manage advertising.

Content Creators

SnippetMEdia expects that the same Smart Contracts will also be game changing for content creators. With the SnippetMEdia Blockchain, creatives can timestamp and store their content with a unique ID. This creates a transparent, unchangeable audit trail showing who has permission to see a particular piece of content, track it and prevent modification.

What could be the most exciting part of the SnippetMEdia Blockchain for creators is rewarding their content instantly whenever they meet specified milestones and other usage conditions. And because their content is backed up by Smart Contracts, rewards are dispensed automatically and instantaneously at a near-zero cost.

SnippetMEdia and Superiex is aiming to lead the charge in the Philippine media industry by creating a blockchain powered environment where content creators are rewarded fairly and protected from fraud and misuse of their work. At the same time, advertisers get the full value of their ad spend by understanding how their campaigns perform in greater detail through a streamlined, more efficient system of managing business.

Indeed, the mania for cryptocurrency could be largely driven by profits and greed, but the innovation that is blockchain could wind up building something much more than wealth. (PR)