Online spending just surged to a record $26.4 billion during the recent Amazon Prime Day sales event.
But behind the scenes of that e-commerce boom, a massive problem is plaguing the digital ad industry, and this does include bots as well as big traffic and AI generated content.
Now the traditional click economy is crumbling and brands are wasting billions on so-called vanity metrics that they can't even verify.
Now as Johns.
It's new app out of be designed to help brands reach real humans by paying users directly for verified online actions.
We're here to discuss the fight for a verified internet.
We are joined by the founder and CEO of Bill George.
Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Good to be back.
Well, here we are about to kick off the second half of 2026, and it's not too early to look ahead to the holiday season, but we all know with all these devices we have.
In our hands on a daily basis, that shopping happens all the time.
So what is happening when it comes to the world of digital advertising?
Well, I think basically what's happening is there's more and more noise on the internet and less and less ability to actually reach the people that advertisers are trying to reach.
So, Cloudflare said a few weeks ago that for the first time, more than 50% of the internet is now robots or AI or LLMs crawling the internet.
Which theoretically means that 50% of everyone's budget is being wasted by robots clicking on their ads and viewing their ads.
So advertisers and brands are realizing it's harder and harder to reach the customers that they're trying to reach, and they're desperate to find a new way.
Yes, and Phil, it's so funny that we're talking about this because we think about the fact that the target audience for advertising is actual human beings, not other robots or other models out there.
So what is the solution to this problem?
Well, we think that the solution is knowing when some, when traffic is a robot or when traffic is human.
And being able to specifically target the humans and be able to demonstrate to advertisers, hey, 100% of what you spent on advertising went to people that are verified on the internet and those people engaged with you and we can prove that they were people and that they engaged with you.
And that's that's what we are seeing rising.
At the moment verifying people on the internet's really hard and there's projects like Sam Altman's Worldcoin or World that are doing that.
But we think there's lots of different ways to verify people on the internet and then reward those real people on the internet.
Yes, and we just had the Amazon Prime Day event and that was a record breaking one.
And we also saw other retailers out there, other big box retailers trying to have events at the same time.
But of course as we head into the second half, we have some big shopping events coming here in the US.
We're talking about the holiday shopping season or Black Friday.
So when it comes to these massive holidays, why is it so critical for retailers out there to actually shift away from the so-called vanity metrics and start paying for verified outcomes?
Well, I think that effectively.
There's so much noise, there's so little ability for other brands to compete with the Amazons of the world, so it's almost not a level playing field with advertising.
So with rewarded advertising, I think people have a lot of what I call points fatigue.
So people have tried loyalty programs out and things like that, but people don't want another bunch of points.
That they can't do anything with to collect.
We think that and we've demonstrated that people want to be rewarded when they're engaging with brands and they want those rewards to be in something that they can use like cash.
So when we enable brands to pay users cash when they engage with brands and use that cash anywhere, and I think that that's really a point.
Difference.
So we're giving any brand on Earth the ability to run a loyalty program as a turnkey service and pay anyone on Earth when they engage with that brand, and that hasn't been possible before.
So in a world where everyone's got the same suite of tools and those tools aren't working anymore, we're giving them a new power tool that we already know works.
And Phil, I do want to ask you about the term verified internet.
What does that look like and also what does the future of digital marketing actually look like in terms of success?
Yes, so I think verified internet is effectively just saying how can we determine with a high level of confidence that the traffic that people are being charged for has a pulse.
So we've created a Pulse system which basically as users use the Aero app and plug in more of their digital life, we have higher confidence that they're a person, not a robot.
When we know for a fact that they're a person, we can offer them better rewards, we can offer them better opportunities, and we can say to these brands, hey, we've got 3 million Spotify users or we've 5 million Amazon Prime customers, how would you like to target Amazon Prime customers that we know are people?
And that's worth a lot more than a click or an impression, right?
Brands will pay hundreds of dollars for a verified user of a competing platform, and that's the sort of service that we offer.
And that's, you can't offer that unless you know for a fact that these people are people, and that's the verified internet.
Yeah, and finally, Phil, before I let you go, we have a little over 60 seconds here, so I do want to ask you what's sticking and what is it?
What's sticking with these advertising campaigns?
Yeah, I think the most effective campaigns are campaigns where brands can invite people that they know are their ideal customer, like Nike can invite Strava users or Whoop users, or alternatively, Koshi.
Like these new FinTech platforms can target Robinhood users and say, hey, if you're a big Robinhood user and you can prove it through our verification platform, then come over to Koshi and we'll give you big rewards because we know that you're going to be a high value customer.
The user gets rewarded and the brand gets what they're after.
Well, Phil, it was great talking to you.
Thank you so much for joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange and thank you so much for sharing your perspective.
Thanks for having me.
