While blockchain technology has been the next big thing for quite a while, its applications outside anonymous cryptocurrencies are really just starting to be probed (case in point, Steem).
My own industry of expertise, online advertising, is just now flirting with some ideas to utilize blockchain tech to vastly improve what is a large, and generally despised market.
Blockchain for transparency on how ads are displayed
A couple weeks ago, MetaX unveiled plans to use blockchain to solve transparency problems within online advertising. In short, because there are so many companies involved in any one banner ad being shown online, it becomes extremely difficult for the person who originally bought the ad to know exactly where their ad was shown, how it was viewed, and who all got paid for showing that ad. Without blockchain, you essentially have to blindly trust that all of the companies are doing exactly what they say they are doing. However, with ad fraud likely to account for over $3B a year, this is clearly not the case. Creating a democratized ledger for all of these ad transactions would quickly weed out the bad actors, and hopefully help put online advertising back on track.
Blockchain to reward content based on user attention
Perhaps even more exciting is Brave's announcement that they are creating a new token, BAT, that can completely overhaul how online advertising works. BAT will be built on top of the ethereum blockchain, and focuses on rewarding all of the things we view online based on attention. Because Brave runs their own browser, they have the ability to anonymously (very important detail!!) track where each user is devoting their attention (what website are they looking at, did they see the ads on that website, how long did they watch a video, etc). They will then allocate tokens based on those attention metrics. The hope is that in the long run, all of the crappy content plastered with malware and annoying ads will stop getting rewarded, whereas the long article you read about cryptocurrency prices, will get a much larger payout.
Can they succeed?
In the long run, I am bullish that some system of blockchain based reward will significantly change the way online content is monetized (Steem perhaps?). The problem within online advertising specifically is that it is an enormous industry with a bunch of parties that have no incentive to change how it currently works. Even worse, the industry values scale above everything else, which makes it extremely hard for new companies to gain a foothold. Even if something like MetaX can get a few of the smaller ad networks interested in adchain, it will not be useful until it is adopted by one of the big players (Google, Appnexus, Facebook, etc.). For Brave's BAT, they are not as reliant on the current ad industry, but they do need massive user adoption of their browser to make the system work. Asking people to change browsers is not an easy task, and it will be hard to get advertisers or websites interested in BAT until >10% of their users are on Brave. However, even if these particular companies don't succeed, they will hopefully drive the larger players to take a closer look at these new solutions, and make some serious changes to what is currently a terrible user experience.