Presearch, the open, decentralized search engine that rewards community members with distributed ledger blockchain-based tokens, today announced the launch of “keyword Staking,” a new keyword advertising model with a different approach.

According to the company, the concept was inspired by a need to rethink the search engine advertising industry pay-per-click methodology — one still dominated by Google LLC — by adding competitive transparency with blockchain technology, the same technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

With “keyword staking,” Presearch token holders can “stake,” or commit, tokens to specific words and phrases. The advertiser that stakes the most tokens to a term then has their advertisement displayed whenever someone searches for that term. As a result, they receive the traffic when users click on that ad link.

Presearch tokens are known as PRE, and when they are staked they are still owned and controlled by the advertiser, but they cannot be sold or traded until they are “unstaked.” This unstaking can be done at any time the advertiser desires, but it will also undo the attached ad.

During the first year after the introductory period of keyword staking the typical pay-per-click charges for ads will not apply. This will make all traffic received from ads effectively free as a benefit of holding PRE tokens. The intent of this is to drive demand for PRE tokens and thus make them more valuable.

“Keyword Staking is just one more way Presearch is transforming the current online search paradigm,” said Colin Pape, founder and chief executive of Presearch. “We are using blockchain to align the interests of advertisers and users while pioneering an entirely new compensation model for advertising.”

In order to attract users, Presearch currently rewards searchers with a tiny amount of PRE per day. Every search performed on the platform rewards users a quarter token – up to a cap of eight tokens per day. The tokens are approximately one cent each, meaning that a user could make around eight cents a day.

For advertisers, a single PRE token currently buys four impressions and can buy clicks depending on an auction structure. Of course, with the new “keyword staking” model, the per-click costs would be set aside for a period of time.

Since the platform’s initial launch in November 2017, Presearch has gained 1.3 million registered users and more than 300,000 monthly active users and more than 10 million visits per month. Persearch members are also tend to skew heavily toward an interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency assets, as a result, advertising to these sorts of enthusiasts tends has a higher impact.

Equally important for users, Presearch’s ad platform does not harvest or track user data.

Presearch seeks to overturn the Google’s global domination in the search engine market. Google handled more than 88% of all search queries worldwide during 2019, according to analytics website Statista. This dwarfs the other well-known search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! and Baidu, which are significantly smaller but operate similarly in regards to keyword advertising.

A report from eMarketer Inc. in October 2019 showed that the U.S. search ad market alone is estimated at about $55.17 billion and Google maintains a 73.1% share.

“The power of blockchain technology lies in its real-world use cases, and Presearch demonstrates this with a compelling alternative to search engines run by global corporations,” said Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, said during the platform’s launch.

Image: Presearch