Presearch is a search engine that I’ve been using for quite a while now. Not because it’s better than Google but because they gift their users PRE tokens whenever they use the search engine. They’re not worth much but it’s more than Google gives me and it may very well, however unlikely, be the case that sometime in the future they increase in value and I may make some extra dosh. However, as marketers, is Presearch something that we should be paying attention to? Is it an untapped goldmine or just another crypto gimmick?
What is Presearch?
Presearch is a decentralised search engine that promises that you will ‘receive better results and get rewarded with the Presearch decentralised search engine.’ It’s a community-run project where anyone can set up a Presearch node that helps support the platform and like previously stated, they reward users with the PRE tokens when they search.
A New Advertising Model?
Presearch’s advertising model is something that I’d quite confidently say we have never seen before. Instead of paying per click as you would with Google, you are required to stake PRE tokens to a keyword and whoever stakes the most will have their ads displayed for that search query. It’s important to note here that you don’t spend your tokens, you simply allocate them on the platform (they can be unstaked and sold at any time). In other words, you don’t spend your tokens, you just use them as collateral.
On their website, they state that until January 2022, there will be no cost for any traffic you receive through your ads. However, to this day advertisers are still benefiting from free traffic and no announcements have been made about this changing anytime soon.
On the topic of announcements, In the most recent weekly news update, they announced that they will be turning their focus towards the advertising side of the platform and announced a $1 million grant for advertisers. No specific details have been released around this quite yet.
Does Presearch get any significant traffic?
Thanks to the aforementioned weekly news update, this one is rather easy to answer – they report that Presearch has 4.08m registered users as of 9th September 2022 and receive over 4 million searches per day. Not quite Google or even Bing volumes but there is some volume on this platform.
Staking on Presearch
Staking is rather simple – you log onto presearch, make your way to the advertiser section and search for your keywords. You will be shown the number of stakes on that keyword and how much they have allocated. Next, press the ‘Stake This’ button and select how much you would like to allocate (the minimum is 100 tokens as far as I can tell which equates to £7 but the minimum you can purchase on their website is 1000 which equates to £70 as of the 15th September 2022). Then select your outbid notification frequency, write the Ad headline, the description, and add the URL. Agree to the terms and conditions and you’re good to go.
Important to note here is that there is only one keyword match type – Exact match. So from my understanding, if your keyword is ‘Pineapple’ for example, your ad will only display if the search query contains the word Pineapple.
Is this an opportunity that we should take advantage of?
There are a lot of reasons why advertisers may shy away from this platform; for example, there’s no way to tell how much search volume keywords have and the search volumes are going to be far lower than Google and other search engines. These are the sort of drawdowns that come with an innovative platform like Presearch. However, there are plenty of upsides which, at least in my opinion, make this an opportunity that we should explore. The reasons are as follows:
- Presearch being a crypto search engine means that the majority, if not all of its users, are interested in crypto, blockchain, and other related topics. This makes it the perfect hunting ground for businesses that deal in these areas.
- You don’t pay for clicks, you simply hold collateral – very volatile and risky collateral but far better than waving goodbye to your money. There’s even the possibility that you can make a profit by holding it.
- The majority of search queries have no stakes on them, meaning that for as little as £7, you can secure a top-of-the-page ad space.
I believe that because of these reasons, we should at the very least, give Presearch some attention. Even if it’s just throwing £70 at it and staking for 10 keywords. The worst-case scenario is that we stake for a month, get no traffic, and sell our tokens at a loss; losing something in the area of £30. I don’t know about you but I’ve definitely lost more money on Google Ads.
Update – After a month of running ads on presearch, I summarised my experience and whether it was worth it in the following article – Presearch Update – Was it worth it?
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