Hey SN,

I'm Chris, one of the cofounders of a startup called User Provided Advertising ID (aka UPAID). We are building a new product for consumers to control the level of personalization in their ads and start earning money from them.

The wallet that powers this project is Lightning / UMA, hence why I'm sharing it here.

Would love you to check it out and share your feedback with me!

UPAID is a browser extension & phone application that enables people to create their own pseudonymous Advertising ID and opt into sharing it with advertisers & publishers, in exchange for a portion of the ad spend used to show them ads. UPAID users maintain control over their ID and can reset it with the click of a button at any time, thus disassociating any data that was previously tied to it.

You may have heard third-party cookies are being sunset in Chrome in Q4 2024 and they've already been sunset from Safari and Firefox.

You may have also heard about the increasing scrutiny around data collection via laws like GDPR, CCPA, and more.

The point is- if advertisers want to maintain addressable, measurable advertising campaigns, they need to figure out a better way to track consumers and have it done in an explicit opt-in way.

UPAID aims to solve this problem for advertisers.

#1 The obvious one: advertisers. No tracking = no targeting & no ability to measure performance.

#2 Publishers. When cookies/advertising identifiers go away, publisher ad revenue drops drastically.

"We observed that for the top 500 global publishers, average revenue in the treatment group decreased by 52%, with a median per-publisher decline of 64%."

source: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-party_cookies_publisher_revenue.pdf

Publishers are already struggling to keep the lights on. We think UPAID will help them in 2 ways:

First, when a publisher's audience has UPAID, it means the value of their ads will be 2-3x higher because the user is "identifiable". (Users that have an ID are worth 3x than non-identified users.)

Second, when a consumer has earned money from UPAID, we think it'll be easy for publishers to start asking consumers to spend a few cents to access content. This will open up a non-advertising revenue stream to help publishers reduce their reliance on ads and subscriptions.

No. We give you the option to turn the ID off if you don't want to be tracked. Instead, you can just tell us what topics you're interested in or want to avoid. We can then pass that information to advertisers. This way, advertisers can still show you relevant ads based on what you like, but without needing to track you. And yes, you still get paid for it, even though it will be less than if you let them track you.

Understandable. Ads do suck. We're just trying to make them suck less and help publishers in the process.

Thanks for checking it out.

If you liked what you read / saw, please sign up for the waitlist at https://upaid.website

Cheers, Chris