We get a lot of questions about the rbidr innovation. Some of the questions we hear most frequently are asked and answered below. Have a question you don’t see answered?
- Why do I care about any of this?
- When you use the term ‘asset’, what are you referring to?
- Why would anyone want to buy time?
- I think I have time for sale, how do I get started?
- What is time-based inventory (TBI)?
- What is ‘underlying value’ or ‘Asset rights’?
- The name ‘rbidr’ seems pretty weird. What’s the story?
- How do you make money?
- I don’t get it. What makes this a big deal?
- How do I know if I have time for sale?
Fair question. The answer depends on who you are.
If you work on the demand-side, either as a company that conducts advertising campaigns, or an agency that helps companies with any such campaigns - you your interest in rbidr will come from your desire to have a holistic understanding of what you are doing across all media. On the demand side, your campaigns are about results. In a perfect world, advertising money would only be spent where the ROI is guaranteed. Technology is edging us closer and closer to this, but you know very well that that the supply side, quite frankly, has little interest in this way of thinking. What's more - you probably don't care what mediums are selected to fulfill your campaigns - you just want results. If your target demographics can be impacted and influenced by radio and the web, will you lament that you didn't use television in the media mix? My guess is no. rbidr's time-based 'vernacular' provides a common mechanism for visualizing campaigns REGARDLESS of media type. We provide a top down view that give you what you want - a top down understanding of total ROI, with the option to drill down into the details to any desired level of granularity.
If you work on the supply-side, ignore everything written above. ;-)
On the supply-side, you are selling your media. You have worked hard to translate the value of that media into the language the demand side wants, but at the end of the day - you are selling time. Sure - on the web, you are selling impressions, but it is absolutely impossible to get a handle on inventory without it being framed in the context of time. rbidr provides the perfect inventory management mechanism, both in terms of merchandizing and yield management. Our time-based approach provides a building block that is easy to understand and work with - so that every slice of time (e.g. every piece of inventory) is properly managed, priced, delivered and reconciled.
An asset is the thing being sold. If someone wants access to a tennis court for an hour, then the asset is the tennis court. If someone wants to put an image on a billboard for a day, then the asset is the billboard. Examples include:
- the right to display a message of some kind on a billboard
- the right to use an athletic facility (tennis court)
- the right to broadcast content or advertising over the radio
- the right to include point of sale messaging on an in-store display
- the right to shelf space in a retail store
- the right to use a piece of equipment
- the right to access real estate
- the right to receive radiological services
- the right to use the CPU of a decentralized computer
- the right to access power/energy
Don’t be afraid to ask us a question!
People buy time every day. Our visual framework and ecommerce platform make these very transactions more efficient for all participating parties.
Our software platform will soon be available for public use. Check back with us soon for news about the product launch. If your organization is looking for an enterprise solution, contact us.
Slices of time related to an time-based asset. TBI always share the following characteristics:
- a fixed start time
- a fixed expiration time
- an association to some ‘right’
- becomes value-less upon expiration
The rights associated to TBI represent the value attained by the buyer in acquiring an increment of time. The buyer is purchasing the right to do something, possess something, or receive something for the period of time in question. The types of rights potentially transacted for on rbidr can be extremely disparate in nature.
The domain was available. Also - in certain scenarios, auctions are pretty important to the platform, hence the ‘bid’ in r - BID - r.. We also sit in-between sellers and buyers in terms of providing a trading platform - so it is reasonable to say we ‘arbitrate’ between the two sides. The platform may also be used for arbitrage. It fits,... ok?
Our basic model is similar to eBay in that we take a transaction fee out of every consummated sale on the platform. We also provide licensing and custom integration services for enterprise users.
We are not reinventing ecommerce, nor are we introducing the world to the ‘timeline’ concept (this is ground well traveled in terms of video editing software, for example). Our patent pending innovation is to create a visual and technology framework around translating time into inventory. To think about it another way, there is nothing stopping the owner of a digital billboard from selling 10 seconds of ‘access’ to the billboard on Ebay. That would certainly work... however each ‘piece of inventory’ would be a separate listing and each transaction would have to be fulfilled in 1-off fashion. More importantly, once inventory is presented within our visual framework - certain other optimizing capabilities become apparent. Look at what we are doing with equivalency , for example. Trust us when we say this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Are you renting, leasing, or otherwise giving access to something for a period of time? Are you temporarily using someone else’s property, even something abstract like a CPU? The bottom line is our software is probably not all that helpful to you if you sell widgets, but if what you are selling can be characterized in terms of time, we can help.