Bitcoin Forum

Click here to get your ad. (https://bitcointalk.org/special_ads.php)

To commemorate two years of forum ads, ad rounds 104 and 105 will be special. Round 104 will have a variable number of ad slots. If you pay at least 0.025 BTC to the address on the page above, and you submit an ad there, and your ad is accepted, then your ad will be in round 104. Round 105 will have the usual 10 slots, though none of them will be reserved. Of those 10 slots, 5 will go to the 5 people who pay the most on the page above (ties will be broken randomly). The remaining 5 slots will go to the 5 winners of a raffle. Both rounds will be the usual 7+ days in length.

The raffle works like this: For every 0.001 BTC that you pay above 0.025 at the above page, you get a raffle ticket. I will publish the list of raffle ticket owners once the ad payment period is over, and then I will pick 5 winners using randomness from the block chain. Each slot is worth about 2.5 BTC, so you could easily get a very good deal on a slot.

If you win a slot in round 105, I will initially use your round 104 ad. But if you PM me after you know that you've won such a slot, you can change your ad to something else one time, and you can use the full range of HTML/CSS (no images) usually allowed. You can sell your round 105 ad space if you want, but this counts as your one allowed change.

One ad per person. No alt accounts, and you can't directly pay several people in order to get your thing advertised several times. Referral systems are generally OK. If you try to register multiple ads and I find out, I will keep all of your ad payments. Accounts created after the time of this post can't participate in this event.

You must pay and register your ad within about 7 days. At some arbitrary time 7+ days from now, I will first shut down special_ads.php, and then a couple hours later I will tabulate the results. If I receive your BTC after that, you will not be counted. You may not change your ad for round 104 after special_ads.php is closed.

Because the forum is HTTPS, you will not receive any referrer info from clicks! If you want to track forum clicks, put something like "?bct" at the end of your URL, and look for that in your access logs.

Ad stats are here: https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats . Keep in mind that you will get fewer impressions for round 104 because there will be more slots, and impressions are in any case not guaranteed.

Historical remark: I first started the ad and donation programs because the forum was running out of money to even be hosted on a low-power VPS. For the one-year ad event, the forum had a modest amount of money, and I was mostly interested in collecting money for improved forum software. Since then, the forum's wealth has increased by about 11,000%, we're talking to a software engineering firm about finally getting some great forum software built, and I'm just doing this event for the fun of it. :)

Interesting, may have to grab one. Thanks!

Wow! This is nice! Sad that my site is still in development...

Cool, I might participate!

I should probably get on this.

Definitely interested in this. Thanks theymos!

Sounds awesome. Thank you very much, Theymos.

Only two people have paid so far, so you could get a ridiculously good deal here. If there are less than 10 people at the end of this, you could get the impressions of 2+ normal slots, which normally go for ~2.5 BTC.

I wish I knew about this offer sooner as I was looking to spread the word about my amazon UK shop (got to sell more things for the big move later next year) and my travel blog (need to get more visitors/sell adspace to fund it's running costs/expansion).

Since there seems to be only 1 ad slot,I must choose between what site I want promoted on here,My travel blog or my amazon UK shop?Maybe some of you on the forums here can help me choose.

Travel blog:www.film2240.blogspot.co.uk (http://www.film2240.blogspot.co.uk)
Amazon UK shop:http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/AI2E0Q506MT4A (http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/AI2E0Q506MT4A)

Which one would you advise me to focus on for now?
Thanks :)

want one  :)

Seems like a great deal. Don't have anything to advertise though. Anyways, happy you are making progress towards that forum software update.

I'd guess that the blog would get more interest.

If you want more viewers then the blog. If you are looking to make money then amazon...

Will definitely get on this. Cheers!

i feel the same.

Update: 8 people have paid now.

12 people have paid now. Only about a day left.

Hey theymos! I just want to make a suggestion. You should add a little gig timer that lets people know how much time is left. I saw some other people do it and it was pretty cool! :)

18 people now. I'm too busy to process this right now, so I'm going to extend the payment period by about a day.

This event is now over. Here are the people who paid:

I ended up accepting all ads.

Ads are now up:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

These 5 people paid the most and will have their ads in round 105: infamousdutch, sagrid, Stunna, BitcoinFr34k, and seleme.

The raffle will work like this:
- I will take the block hash of block 274285, hash it once with SHA-256, and convert the result to binary.
- Starting at the left of the binary hash output, I will take 9 bits. If this is greater than 340, I will throw it out. Otherwise, whoever owns the ticket with this number wins a slot. (Tickets shown above, inclusive on both sides.) You can win more than once.
- I will then repeat with the next 9 bits, etc. until all 5 slots are filled. If I use up all of the bits in this hash, I will hash the hash again to add more data to the end of the stream.

Thanks to everyone who participated! I won't put up the next ad auction for about a week.

Results of the raffle:

If I made an error, you need to tell within the next few days or it'll be too late.

So Round 105 will be:

Slots Person
3 infamousdutch
2 sagrid
1 Stunna
1 BitcoinFr34k
1 seleme
1 goldNET
1 uk1

Hello there,

when would be the next opportunity to get into the advertising train? Or is the chance gone for two years? :)

If I wanted, could I buy every ad slot available with a variety of ads?

You can buy slots from the people who won them. One ad per slot.


Normal auctions will resume in a few days. I'll probably do something similar to this in a year.

I noticed it was ad time when I saw the Choo choo train incoming  8)