Bitcoin Forum

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, the forum is selling space for one text advertisement in the rotating "News" section at the top of every page.

Your ad text (ignoring link URLs, etc.) must be less than 70 characters, and it can only contain links: no other style. It will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". It will currently appear on one out of every six five pageloads, though it may appear more or less often depending on how many other news items there are. There will be no other ads while your ad is running.

Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may be rejected for other reasons.

This auction is for 7 days of ad time, starting when I put the ad up. (Probably you'll also get some additional time, since I'll only remove your ad when a new one is ready.)

Stats: On the 27^th of September, 2011 there were about 730,000 views of topics. So an ad would have appeared on about 120,000 146,000 of these views, and also on non-topic-page views (reply pages, topic indexes, etc.). I have no way of knowing how many of these views were real people.

Teppy reports that his ad received 204 clicks with 177 unique IPs.

Auction rules

Post your bids in this thread.

- Starting bid: 1 BTC
- Minimum increment: 1 BTC
- Auction ends: exactly 7 days after the time of this post

If any bids occur less than 30 minutes before the auction end time, then the auction will be extended by 30 minutes. If any bids occur less than 30 minutes before the new end time, then the auction will be extended again, etc. The time will not extend beyond 6 hours total.

Whoever wins should PM me with the ad text.

(Edit: Change frequency and add Teppy's stats.)

Is there a "buy-it-now" price?

No. I can't actually deliver the product until the current ad's time expires (in 7 days from now), so I don't see any point in allowing the auction to end early.

I'll start it off with 1BTC :)

2

3

5
for btc-play.com

It's an auction. The price will go only as high as people are willing to pay.

This is the bitcoin forum, with a userbase which might not be larger than somethingAwful's, but I can guarantee more people here know what bitcoins are and are willing to check out what's on the other end of the ad link. *That* is why the advertising here is so attractive to people.

Put me down for 6 btc, to advertise bitcointorrentz.com

10 btc ....

Because Teppy had some disappointing stats (only 204 clicks), I increased the frequency from a sixth to a fifth of all pageloads.

11btc for BTCSportsbet.com

anyone want to go in on it ? and create a landing page with our links ? I own the domain not being used bitcoinbetas.com  and I'll just change it to display our links :)  PM ME if you want to go in on this. thanks.

BTC only.

I think he really ment 250000BTC
--------------
But seriously I was gonna bid at 6 BTC until i saw that 11BTC was the last price.... I'll have to wait till I get more funding

Those are VERY disappointing stats for the price he paid. I think it was in the region of 50 btc as far as I remember. So thats about 0.25 btc/click. Dailybitcoins.org only charge 0.01 btc/click, or in other words, 25 times less. I hope his conversion ratio was excellent.

For 200 clicks, I would not pay more than 10 btc. Thats about 0.05 btc/click, or x5 more than dailybitcoins. He did make a pretty ridiculous bid of 50btc though. The previous bid was only 3 btc. Why he felt bumping the bid by 47 btc was a good idea, I have no clue.

I paid 50 BTC based on $250 for ~800k impressions, or a CPM of 31 cents or so. Even given the size of the ad, that should be a fantastic price. Here are the full stats:

Number of Clicks: 204
Unique IPs: 177
Conversions: 2
Net Income: 0.391 BTC

A conversion was defined as having made any sort of deposit. We did have ~66 new players in that time, who collectively played for 159 hours. 23 of these players have played for > 1 hour, and 6 of those have been online in the last 24 hours. I've noticed (but haven't formally checked this) that new players don't deposit right away - they tend to play for quite a while using free Bitcoins, even doing some withdrawals initially.

So, this ad campaign definitely wasn't a success, but whether it was a total waste remains to be seen. I'd be glad to share future conversion info on this group of players. Also interested to see how other advertisers fare.

I think advertismemt placement this expesnive shouldbe an image atleast

I believe the ads would be more effective if they were more than just text with a link. Even knowing there might be an interesting promotion, I forget to check it 9 times out of 10, at least, because it just blends into the background.

+1

I think the market will decide the price if they keep doing auctions.  If it is too high, go elsewhere.  I can imagine it leveling off at 5 btc a week, but if they can raise more money this way, go ahead!

I do not want to see display ads, but the rotation could be as high as 50/50 with adds and forum announcements. 

Also detailed metrics of how the last ads went would be good.

Do you mean gross income? Because a net income of 0.4 BTC means you earned 50.4BTC off two people!

I have more luck spotting btc businesses in these threads than I do the ads themselves ;)

I agree that something needs to stand out if it is to remain text based.  Bigger font, brighter colors... something.

I think what he meant was obvious... he certainly didn't earn 50.4 btc from 2 transactions.
How ever much fun it might be, there is no need to rub salt in his wound with pedantic comments like that.

I agree aswell shallow and padantic....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctf260qnDeU

I didn't mean any malice, and it's a legitimate question. I apologize for any people insulted by my comment.

I've implemented a much better ad system now, so this auction is canceled. New auction:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47733.0