Discovering another application of blockchain. And moving from words to actions with uKit AI project.
The modern web has started with just one website almost 30 years ago. And creating a website, whatever its type, is still a good idea if you want to share some information or offer goods and services. Having a website makes you accessible to everyone, as people don’t need to take extra steps like signing up with a particular social network or downloading one more mobile app. That’s why, though our technologies and gadgets have evolved drastically by this time, websites are cornerstones the contemporary Internet is based on.
Let’s take a look at some figures and facts about the current state of the website segment
There’s over 1 billion of them already. No one will tell you the exact number: some sources say it’s about 1.3 bln, others claim there are even more — the figure will always be floating due to the scoring methods and fact that every second some website may be “born” or disappear. But what wedefinitely know is that it’s a growing trend in the long run. Much like the population trend.
Find more stats here on pages 19–25
Number of websites is growing faster than the Internet population. Though only about half of the world’s population has access to the Internet and there are rapidly emerging markets like Asia and Africa, it’s a fact — by the end of 2000s, there was about 9 unique visitors per 1 unique website; now the ratio is approximately 4:1.
That may be surprising for IT industry professionals
who got used to the situation when LinkedIn/Facebook/Angellist accounts serve as a good alternative for a personal website and even for a blog. But today the web is no longer about personal websites and standalone blogs.
Entrepreneurs, who create working places in the offline world, make the majority of new website owners these days. For example, the number of small businesses with websites has grown from less than 50% to over 70% in the US and EU for the past 7–10 years. And Their potential is far from being exhausted since only about half of businesses in the world have websites.
If we take the traditional technology adoption life cycle, it means that websites as a mass technology are at their golden age.
So, while the web pioneers and early birds are into Crypto, ML, VR, AR, IoT and you-name-it next-gen technologies and markets, an average user has just become open to the idea of websites.
What trend is forming next for this majority?
Websites are here to stay. The latest researches show the evident profit small businesses get from starting and maintaining their own website — it helps increase the turnover by 45–60%.
A modern website is an element of marketing activities — and, according to the interviews, it’s the most effective tool for customer acquisition. As many as 89% of entrepreneurs point that out.
Part of the infographics done by Invesp
Marketing is becoming more data driven. And more competitive. Several factors affect this trend. First, websites outrun web population in terms of growth. Second, now you need to fight for attention to your proposal in this media buzz as never before. If you want to attract and keep someone’s attention today, make your message more clear and personal. To do this, you need to know something about the person you’re addressing to.
Large companies that provide you with goods and information (Netflix, Amazon, etc) already use data about us as well as AI-automation to make their websites more personal and benefit from it because we tend to spend more time (and often money) on their websites after they were personalized.
Limited access to big data and capacities in order to process it increases the competitive edge that a small number of big companies have over a great number of small businesses. It’s the next problem to be solved — and the next trend on the way.
Another website personalization example from the famous brand that can afford it
We’ve seen it a dozen times: technologies and tools first available only for an industry’s big players and professionals turn into widespread and affordable instruments. This already happened to websites themselves — you don’t need to know a lot to build a website nowadays and its maintenance will cost you only about $50 a year.
How can the blockchain make a difference if we combine data mining with website building
Next challenge on the market is to make website personalization as affordable and easy as website building has already become. As one more fact about websites in 2018 states that over 70% of Internet users suffer from the ‘not getting what we want’ problem when they visit websites. And there are almost 4 billions users on the Internet.
Simplified scheme of how a mass market website personalization service might work: crowd-owned data management platform (in the picture above it’s called uData) is the key
One of the ways the uKit AI team sees to make it affordable is to add big data sources and data mining capacities to the backend of a mass-used website building platform — like the one we already have. Basically, we need a tool that understands what kind of a visitor it deals with by mining information from their previous behavior on other websites. So, this must be an AI-based tool that will be constantly learning, predicting why different people will submit an application or place an order on this particular website, and testing these predictions.
AI needs to get feedback — and the feedback for it is the new data, literally. Website owners should share some data back to train the system so it can work with their websites even better. At the same time, such crowd-used AI becomes affordable for everyone. Especially, when you get tokens for sharing data and can pay with them for website personalization.
This is the concept of the ecosystem we presented last December — and got the first bunch of token holders. This month we’ve started the next stage of our campaign:
The blockchain & tokenization are the things that can balance out the chances of the parties that create such a product.
On the one hand, we still need a big company with expertise on the market (company, like ours, actually) — it will develop and maintain the infrastructure of such AI-based platform because the project like this requires lots of resources. A big company will also buy the core amount of data to train AI: data is already offered for sale by data management platforms (DMPs) that work with large players.
On the other hand, we have thousands of SMB owners who may contribute to the platform in order to train AI to be more effective with their particular websites. Since ‘data is the new oil’, people should get a reward for sharing it.
In our case, the reward may be different and depend on such parameters as amount of data shared by a unique participant, the whole amount of data shared by all participants. And what makes such mechanism transparent — the blockchain, of course.
And a token is the part that makes the reward program attractive: share data and get tokens to make your website more effective with AI. As simple as that.
P.S. So, here’s our view on how the next generation of websites should look and work. We’ll be glad to hear feedback from you here or in our Telegram community.