Bitcoin Forum

Howdy again! John here from bc4wp.com.

We've just released a new bitcoin advertising network known as puppytwist.com (http://puppytwist.com) and would love some feedback / participation / feature requests / questions.

I know a lot of you (and me) have at some point wanted to monetize your site traffic via bitcoin ads, but setting them up has been a crazy big hassle. If setup at all, you then realized how little money you got out of it.

Long story short, we built puppytwist.com not so much to profit, but to make for an as-simple-as-possible exchange of ads between publishers and advertisers. The payout % is quite high for publishers (currently 90%).

We'd love to hear some feedback right here in the forum (or on our contact form from the site), so let us know what you think : )

http://puppytwist.com/wp-content/themes/puppytwist/images/big-puppy.png (http://puppytwist.com)

Link again: http://puppytwist.com (http://puppytwist.com)

clean design! i'll have to do more testing later, be back with my analysis

The design reminded me Bitcoinadvertisers.com which have not so good reputation :(

Thanks! We look forward to reading your review of it : )


I see what you mean. We've checked out a few competitors and what they were doin right, and what they were doing wrong so we could improve & find the gaps of what people wanted that wasn't being provided.

Hopefully you give us a fair shot - would love to read your thoughts & review as well!

You should not use publishers bitcoin addresses in the ads themselves.

Excellent suggestion! Will implement that immediately : )

Alrighty, bitcoin addresses have been removed from the ad embed code and replaced with internal IDs. It is also backwards-compatible with any already-embedded ads.

Thank you for the suggestion psy, any more are very much welcome : )

bump

bump

This is very cool. Site looks great and the interface is sleek. I know the advertising base will get better and better as more people start using it, too.

I may try to advertise and possibly even put an ad banner on one of my sites :-). To clarify, clicks cost you your bid amount, and impressions without clicks cost nothing? The click through ratios reported are pretty impressive.

Did notice one bug, too. Under stats pages, the source domain's <a> tag is set to just the domain without http://. The browser then treats it as a local link off the site, and so is broken. Just need to add http:// as a prefix you should be golden. Would also be awesome if you added IPv6 support. Noticed that you're probably using Rackspace Cloud Servers. The Open Cloud/Openstack servers should come with an IPv6 address already. Pretty much just need to add an AAAA record and test it.

Sincerely,
Teran

Doh! You got me; just changed how the source works (used to store full url, truncated on stats page but now truncates during storage) and forgot to update that - thanks for the heads up!

I'll look into the IPv6 support, but before I start Googling - do tell it's purpose & benefit : )

Thank you for the kind words, they are significantly appreciated : )

Oh and yes, impressions are free. All impressions and clicks are unique in sets of: ad + ip + day

Okay, so I created an ad and a publishing ID. Actually both at the same page load to test, and it seems fine. I put the ads on two of my sites. I'm normally fairly anti-advertising, but I really want to see Bitcoin take off. And these ads are not obtrusive at all; they blend in well while still sticking out, if that makes sense.

However, I did run into a problem. My Bitcoin payment is not confirming on the site. It keeps retrying every 15 seconds and does not register that I've sent it a payment. I already have five confirmations on it today, as well. Here's the transaction: http://blockchain.info/tx/648f1a99783e3994e3cbace71e535bc4fb9e0a05da0b39977d4d6626a7f604c5

Did I do something wrong, or maybe there's a bug in the code somewhere?


Awesome that you got it fixed so quickly!

So right now, IPv6 isn't too much of a big deal. But IPv4 addresses are running out and will altogether at some point. There's not an IP for every person alive, and you tend to need at least that with the way people use them. Although NATing helps and what not, IPv6 really is the best answer at the moment for many reasons. If you support IPv6, anyone only on IPv6 (rare, but possible) can still reach your site. And for me, I try to have fully IPv6 capable sites, so linking in content that is also IPv6 ready is a huge plus. In a couple years the addresses will start getting rare enough that most VPSs probably will come without them, and they'll get rarer and rarer. I think the sale price of IP blocks over the years says a lot.

Still, it's nothing huge. Just would be nice to have :-).

Also, in your publisher code you use src="//puppytwist.com/etc". Does // mean load on same protocol as the source page? It seems to work, but I thought it was a bug at first. I've never seen that before.

Thanks,
Teran

Fixed! Thanks for being patient with it.


Doing that makes it worth on both http:// and https:// in case someone puts them on a secure page. Excellent feedback so far, I truly do appreciate it!

Ah, looks like the payment receive API for blockchain.info is down? Anywho, I'll manually approve (probably within 60 seconds) any new advertisers until it's automated again.

All good now with the purchase API, was just a big delay.

Added publisher "recent clicks" stats in the sidebar of the stats page here: http://puppytwist.com/stats/ (http://puppytwist.com/stats/)

bump : )

Updated the system to blacklist some obvisouly-suspicious sites generating traffic.

Just went through the logs and it definitely seems like people are paying for services that get mass amounts of impressions and auto-redirect to a destination. While none of these have actually generated any clicks, we went ahead and banned them from the stats.

Click through rates and overall stats should look significantly more accurate now : )

bump  ;)

Another round of cleaning has been done, with roughly 50 clicks & commissions removed from the system due to fraud detection.

On that note, we've now made it so the system will now multiple clicks from the same ip on the same day from the same source. It used to be set to the same ip on the same day from the same ad, but some folks decided to constantly click through all the ads that would show up; this isn't how advertising should work : )

For any publishers, your remaining click totals have automatically been adjusted. We'll continue to weed out fraudulent clicks and put systems in place to ensure top quality in the traffic being purchased.

When attempting to upload an image creative, it displays a Word Press login dialog, but there does not appear to be any registration/signup option on your site... ?

Ah, you're absolutely right. For the time being we've disabled the uploader. You can go ahead and paste the url to the image directly instead of uploading it to our servers until we fix it : )

You should allow for "accounts" in your site where one could change options and addresses.

I'd like to give it a shot but I'm afraid I cannot change it later so I have to create a throwaway BTC address, and finally I just pass.

While I completely get where you're coming from in terms of functionality, the core basis for puppytwist is to keep it as simple and quick to get going as possible.

On the flip side, I'm trying to understand a scenario that you'd want to change an address, and where. As a publisher you can change your address to whatever you want - just get new ad code to replace the old.

As an advertiser, you never specify an address as there is no need to ever ask for one : )

If you wouldn't mind clarifying a bit?

The problem is that your ad can remain somewhere outside of your control with settings you want changed and linked to an address that can be traced to you. For instance if you put it in a post you can edit, or it gets cached.

Which settings would you like to have be changeable? I'm open to ideas : )

Well, address and content nature... I think that's basically every setting innit?

Gotchya. So other than providing categories for publishers to specify and advertisers to target, the publisher's address is the most important thing you'd want to be able to customize?

While I can definitely see how that would be useful, I still think keeping it as-simple-as-possible without registrations or passwords of any sort is the best route. The addresses are stored internally and are only indicated via their internal ID number to the ad embed code, so there's no way for anyone to see which address you're using.

Because of this anonymity, I think it's best if publishers used addresses that they plan on receiving their earnings to without having the ability to change them. There shouldn't be a need to create throwaway addresses because of this.

On the other hand with the categories - I'll try and find a way to work it into the UI so it doesn't increase the to-do's for publishers and advertisers to get started if they don't care about categories (I imagine most people won't care too much or won't be very accurate in choosing them).

I VERY much appreciate your input though, it helps me a great deal in developing tools for the audience, by the audience.

I don't think it's hard to offer both options. A lot like imgur, you can use it logged off (or even without an account), but if you log in then you can keep track of your stuff. Leave the session cookie so you can even register post-fact.

I've done this stuff myself and it wasn't too hard, in PHP, python, and perl, and RoR you have these session libraries that do most of the work for you.

Another round of spammers banned and clicks/commissions auto-adjusted. Will be implementing some more convenient fraud detection tools here soon, but I'm manually ensuring high click quality personally for now.

Enjoy!

Quick question; where are the banner ad sizes? Looking on your competitor (bitcoinadvertising - which seems to be suffering some serious outages at the moment) - they specify the banner sizes for their images. I'm assuming arbitrary sized images linked to an advert are going to suffer in appearance if you 'squish' them into a predetermined x/y rectangle?

EDIT: add->ad* :P

Good question! For now we accept 468x60 graphical banner ads; since that is the most common we wanted to at least start out with those. Allowing publishers and advertisers to specify different sizes is on the list of improvements to make but we purposely left this part out to maintain the simplicity of it all during launchtime.

If you try and upload an image of a different size, it'll get shrinked to 468x60 - not cropped, but stretched : )

Alrighty, some excellent automated anti-fraud logic has been implemented and so far for the past few days, it's worked flawlessly. Rest assured, any advertising through puppytwist will be legitimate (as opposed to some of those other services : P).

On the stats page, we made it now show the unique impressions for both today and all time for each ad.

We re-worked some of the logic concerning impressions to be significantly faster and not need to  store 100's of thousands of impressions in the database : P

As a side-effect, it gives this "so far today" impression stat which can be handy for watching your ad work it's magic. We'll have some nice graphs & charges based on this new data as well as a "clicks" version of this in the near future.

Enjoy!

Further optimized the ad-serving logic to be even faster than before : )

bump

I'm going to give this a second shot this weekend :)

I look forward to hearing your review of it! : )

Hi. I've sent you 0.04 BTC 16 hours ago. Any idea when my ad will be displayed? Thanks.

-nocube (BitcoinMeister.com)

Fixed! For whatever reason the API lagged in receiving your payment notification. Your ad is now live; thanks for your patience.

Thanks!

Hi!
I have a problem with PuppyTwist.


[XPOST] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219289.new#new
[XPOST] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219288.new#new
[XPOST] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219287.new#new

Please, I need a solution!

Howdy! Will take care of that for ya - looks like it's getting stuck trying to process your payout request.

Send follow-up PM's to me just incase I'm away from here - thanks!

Well, I am waiting for it...

And still waiting...

After the site went down, I don't see my publisher stats anymore. Is that something that you're still working on restoring?

He has sold it to someone, the new owner is playing with this.

Even I am not able to see stat sometimes and Its not updating at all even if I can see them.

I have removed the ads from my websites now, PuppyTwist is near-to-dead.

Edit: Also, have a look at http://123bitcoins.com/ . Saw something interesting?

So Take money from the advertisers, don't pay the publishers is the business motto now? That's sad.

Hey anzy,

Could you please process my payout too?

Sent you a PM 2 days ago.

:)

The site seems down currently.