It may sounds strange, but this is really our honest goal. We want to change the ad industry.
The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.
We know for a fact that many of the players in the business, the ones that matter, don't really care about intruding on people's privacy. For them, it is what they need to do to achieve their goals.
We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.
That said, we think we can make a change... for the better. We can think about how to do this from first principles, to be the first customer of our tech.
Frankly, no one will be willing to play the new game with us if we can't prove that it works at least as good as the current way they are doing things: the old tech may be clunky, not that effective and there may be a lot of middlemen, but there are 2 decades of investment in the way its built.
Users are affected. Users care. We know we can make for a web with less annoying ads. They don't need to be nagging, vying for your attention the same way they are now. They don't need to be creepy. And you know what? They may not even be ads as you know them today.
We thought about this a lot, and it's a very touchy topic, one which would cause controversy any way we'd broach it . Why do you think we're not being honest?
