Bitcoin Forum

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. This income is used primarily to cover hosting costs and to pay moderators for their work (there are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees). Any leftover amount is typically either saved for future expenses or otherwise reinvested into the forum or the ecosystem.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Nine of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post. Hero/Legendary members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads; these people don't increase the impression stats for your ads.

Design & ad restrictions

Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. No ICOs^{[1] (#post_icodef)}, loggable mixers^{[2] (#post_logmix)}, banks, funds, or anything that a person can be said to "invest" in; I may very rarely make exceptions if you convince me that you are ultra legit, but don't count on it. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

See the ad design rules (https://bitcointalk.org/ad_design.php) for info on designing forum ads.

When advertising a new service, you should always check with me in advance whether your service is OK. I will sometimes accept bids of people who don't do this, but such people are taking the risk of being rejected at the last minute. It's also a good idea for you to have me check your ad's HTML+CSS in advance, especially if this is your first time advertising.

Duration/timing

 - Ad slots won in this auction will run from noon September 9 (US Eastern time) to noon October 7. (28 days.)
 - This auction will end sometime between August 30 and September 3, but September 1 is most likely.
 - You must pay within 48 hours of the auction ending. Only Bitcoin is accepted. If you fail to pay in time, your ad slots may be resold, and in cases where I feel that you're acting in bad faith, I may even give you a negative trust rating.
 - You must send me a valid ad (ie. one not breaking any of the styling or other rules) before noon September 8. If you fail to send a valid ad in time, then the ad round will start without you, and you will be "burning time". You can still send an ad after the deadline, and usually this ad will be put up fairly quickly, but no particular timeline is guaranteed after the deadline.
 - If extended downtime or similar issues cause your ad not to be displayed for a long time, we generally give prorated refunds (USD-denominated) for the lost time, but this is not guaranteed.

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Auction rules

New members are likely to have their bids rejected unless they PM me first (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=35), telling me what they're going to advertise. New members might also be required to pay some amount in advance. Additionally, if you have never purchased forum ad space before, and it is not blatantly obvious what you're going to advertise, say what you're going to advertise in your first bid, or tell me in a PM.

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in mBTC per slot. (10 mBTC = 0.01 BTC.) You must state the maximum number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all nine slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 9 slots @ 50 mBTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 9 slots. If the two highest bids are 9 slots @ 40 mBTC and 1 slot @ 50 mBTC, then the first person will get 8 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 50" means 2 slots for 50 mBTC each. Not 2 slots for 50 mBTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however, like "5 @ 10 and 1 @ 50".
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 2 mBTC.
- The bidding starts at 2 mBTC.
- The auction ends at an arbitrary time between August 30 and September 3. Times closer to 8:00AM September 1 (US Eastern time) are more likely.
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made.

Price flattening

At the end of the auction, after the winning bids are all determined, I will do a "price flattening" operation. This has no effect on which bids actually win, but is instead just meant to make the prices actually paid by bidders more equal. For each bid, in order of lowest to greatest price/slot, I will reduce each bid's price/slot to the highest value which is equal to or only the minimum increment greater than the next-lower bid. This allows you to bid higher prices without worrying so much, but you still mustn't bid more than you're willing to pay. Example:


Payment, etc.

You must pay for your slots within 48 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35) after announcing the auction results in this thread. You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

---

[1]: For the purposes of forum ads, an ICO is any token, altcoin, or other altcoin-like thing which meets any of the following criteria: it is primarily run/backed by a company; it is substantially, fundamentally centralized in either operation or coin distribution; or it is not yet possible for two unprivileged users of the system to send coins directly to each other in a P2P way. The intention here is to allow community efforts to advertise things like Litecoin, but not to allow ICO funding, even when the ICO is disguised in various ways.
[2]: A loggable mixer is a service marketed primarily for improving transaction privacy which accepts full custody of cryptocurrency for a time and has the technical ability to log where the cryptocurrency comes from and goes to (even if they promise not to log).

Note that starting with the round being bid on here, we might stop attempting to bypass adblockers.

Currently, the page is structured so that it's impossible for traditional adblockers based on CSS selectors to block the bitcointalk.org ad area in general (without also breaking the page). However:

 1) Adblockers can still block your ad in particular (as opposed to the ad area for all ads) if your ads are not designed in a very specific way, and advertisers almost never design their ads to be adblocker-resistant. In the past 2 years, I'd guess that there have been maybe one or two advertisers who designed their ads so that they couldn't easily be blocked. (If you're not sure whether your ad is adblocker-resistant, then it's not.)
 2) Some adblockers such as uBlock have now extended the traditional adblocker capabilities in a way which can only really be bypassed by constantly making manual changes to the page structure to counteract their filters whenever they update them.
 3) The current adblocker-bypassing capability requires mangling the page's HTML in a way which is maybe unfriendly to search engines and other automated tools.

Therefore, I think that stopping our attempt at bypassing adblockers will have little to no cost to advertisers (whose ads are probably already blocked, or are at least blockable), and continuing it is not worthwhile.

4 @ 2mbtc

1@2

3 @ 4

5 @ 4mBTC

2 @ 4mbtc

5 @ 8mBTC

4 @ 5mBTC

2@ 4mbtc

Read the rules of the auction again if you want your bid to be accepted.
For now based on the current rules I don't think your bid will be accepted.

Thanks for the reminder tokyohd.

Let me correct my bid

4 @ 6mbtc

3@10mBTC

4 @ 10mBTC

This is looking messy, BK8.Official, are you bidding for just 4 slots or a total of 7?

4 slot, at 10mBTC

3 @ 10mBTC
+
2 @ 12mBTC

3 @ 14 mBTC

Updated bid:

5 @ 12 mBTC for a total of 5 ads, if I have this all down correctly.

Current auction status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
3 14 Panxora_COO
5 12 Hhampuz
1 10 BK8.Official

The auction continues.

Updated bid:

1 @ 16mBTC

1 @ 11mBTC
+
2 @ 13mBTC

ICO's are not allowed you may check the rule.

We would like to promote our DeFi Platform that we launch on 9 of September (Cross-chain decentralized exchange for swapping ERC20-BEP20 tokens)

4 slot, 14mBTC

3 @ 15mBTC

Updated bid:

1 @ 14mBTC
+
4 @ 16mBTC

If my math is right, lol.

2 @ 18mBTC

1 @ 20mBTC

2 @ 17 mbtc

Bids must be evenly divisible by 2 mBTC. When this rule is broken, I always round down to the next valid amount.

I need more info from Hashbon. His bids may or may not be accepted. I will post here when I know for sure.


Bids from 1xbit will not be accepted.

Current auction status if Hashbon's bids are accepted:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
2 18 Panxora_COO
1 16 bitcarra
4 16 Hhampuz
2 16 Hashbon

If his bids are not accepted:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
2 18 Panxora_COO
1 16 bitcarra
4 16 Hhampuz
2 14 BK8.Official

The auction continues.

4 slot, 18mBTC

2 @ 18 mbtc

Hashbon's bids will be accepted. Current auction status:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
2 18 Panxora_COO
4 18 BK8.Official
2 18 Hashbon
1 16 bitcarra

The auction continues.

1 @ 18mBTC
+
4 @ 20mBTC

2 @ 20 mbtc

Updated bid:

5@20mBTC

Bid update
4 slot, 22mBTC

2 @ 22 mbtc

updated bid 1 @ 24

Auction ended, final result:
Slots mBTC/Slot Person
1 24 bitcarra
4 22 BK8.Official
2 22 Hashbon
2 20 Hhampuz