Interesting project! When are stats updated?
Thanks! Stats are currently updated every 3 minutes. |
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Can you describe the ad selection algorithm exactly? As I understand it now it goes like this:
1. A dice drop decides whether it will display a bootstrapping ad or not. 10% to be a bootstraping ad (which is ANY ad that still has unspent bootstrap money, right?).
2. It evaluates each ad by the money it has given you in the last month (or in the last accounting period which is different for each ad?) divided by the impressions it had.
3. It shows the ad with the most profitable evaluation. Maybe it would make more sense to pick a random ad weighted by the value calculated in step 2 instead of just the best one?
Ad selection algorithm (without minor details): $isBootstrapped = mt_rand()%10==0;
if (!$isBootstrapped)
if (!LoadRandomAdForAffiliate())
$isBootstrapped = true;
if ($isBootstrapped)
LoadBootstrappedAd();
LoadBootstrappedAd query: SELECT * FROM Ads WHERE rating >= $filter ORDER BY rand()*$maxBootstrapScore/(1+bootstrapScore) limit 1
Table Ads contains all ads. Bootstrap score = [sum of deposits with >= 6 confirmations] - [sum of deposits with >= 24*6*billingCycle + 6 confirmations] (measured in satoshies). If bootstrapped ad is shown for affiliate, then it becomes connected to that affiliate (appears in Relays table). LoadRandomAdForAffiliate query: SELECT * FROM Relays WHERE affiliateAddress=$affiliateAddress ORDER BY rand()*$maxActiveCPI/(1+activeCPI) limit 1 Each pair of connected <ad, affiliate> has 1 record in table Relays. ActiveCPI is de-facto CPI for this relay during last billingCycle days. Billing cycle is 30 days by default. In future advertisers will be able to specify the billing cycle upon Ad creation (and bootstrap score will be divided by that number). So, answering your questions: 1) correct, but with filtering according to ads' ratings and affiliates' preferences 2) it is not divided by number of impressions... all ads have billing cycle of 30 days now, but in future they will be different (allowing advertisers to specify the speed of spending their money and duration of advertising campaign) 3) it seems to work as you suggested |
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Would be easier if you provided them a library or even a service to do that
Thanks. I was thinking that after helping several advertisers I could develop a solution that would better fit their needs. But now I think I can make & publish some simplistic example that would work in most cases. Update: ok, here it is: https://github.com/arsenische/aaap |
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So, you are counting on the advertisers willingness to reward publishers on their own after getting their (?)money(?) in then pocket?
Yes. It is good for advertisers because it will boost their impressions from that publishers, and they won't pay for fake clicks/impressions. It is good for publishers too because most profitable ads will be shown on their sites (and their income won't be discounted by fake clicks & impressions of other publishers). |
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Added some basic stats to the stats page. Now you can see that Anonymous Ads' affiliates generated 117838 impressions, 2313 clicks and earned 2.65199910 btc during last 30 days. It seems that most advertisers pay only to bootstrap their ads and don't pay to affiliates (I'm paying to affiliates on behalf on advertisers, but I can't detect successful visits). You can think of bootstrapping ads as of connecting them to affiliates. If you already have enough affiliates connected to your ad and you pay for successful visits, you should expect to get much more impressions for less money. It is not that difficult: 1. upon each visit save bitcoin address (that is passed to your site by Anonymous Ads) in a cookie. 2. when visitor gets registered or orders something - read bitcoin address from cookie and associate it with user. 3. when you receive money from that user - send some btc to that bitcoin address (or collect pairs <bitcoin address, amount to send> in CSV file, pass it to btcrelay.com and pay to many affiliates in a single transaction). The system really needs more advertisers that pay for successful visits, so I am going to help advertisers to establish this workflow for free. Please PM me to get help. |
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Well I will try to explain it better. I have put my Anonymous Ads banner code in a signature of an other forum (Not this one  ). Now I am promoting my thread via autosurf (an autosurf, in my case, is a traffic exchange because for it to be a Ponzi scheme it needs to payout money not give traffic to others but this fact isn't the main point) where in the signature the banner is seen. Now let's say that I login to my autosurf account and click Earn Credits. Then automaticly another page opens and shows websites. They rotate every 13 seconds. After I earn enough credits I use them to promote the site in the same way the other websites which were in rotation. To make a few things straight: You only need to keep the broswer open while earning. It means that not the people are watching the ads but only the computer rotates them in their broswer. Also some (but a very very small part) peiple watch those websites like sometimes I do. So I don't know whether that kind of promoting is considered botting or not. And the last thing is that I try to be an honest person because if I wouldn't be I wouldn't be asking for advice and writing this long which I am finishing now. Thanks explanation! So basically what you are saying is that you get many impressions, but very few of them are seen by real people. And probably you have low CTR (or does the system click ads too?). Frankly speaking I don't like this kind of advertising, it seems to be rather inefficient and to negatively affect reputation of Anonymous Ads. If you sell impressions to a buyer who assumes that they are made by people, it is probably a fraud. I am not asking you to stop it because while there is financial incentive for it, people will silently do it. You shouldn't be exclusively penalized for your honesty  There are some technical measures to filter out excessive clicks & impressions, I have idea of some additional measures that could be taken. The ultimate solution is, as I mentioned earlier, embedded into the system by design: if most advertisers pay only for successful visits, there will be very little (or zero) incentive for spending your autosurf credits on Anonymous Ads. |
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Thanks, I had read that article before I wrote a reply;) I'm sorry, I am still confused with the question. Are you going to embed Anonymous Ads code into the site that receives traffic via autosurf, or are you going to advertise your autosurf website via Anonymous Ads? In either case I just can't forbid anything. There is always a way to cheat. The worst I can do is set up negative rating to ads that are obviously erroneous or inappropriate and to filter out suspicious clicks, impressions and IPs. I've read about autosurf and it doesn't seem to be erroneous or inappropriate. It seems it could be somewhat similar to a Ponzi scheme so if you place an ad of some autosurf system, it would receive a rating of about 50 (as gambling). |
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Hey just wanted to ask: can I promote the site where the banner is on an autosurf website?
I am not sure I fully understand what you are talking about, but you are welcome to do whatever you want unless you harm others. If real people see the ads, some of them get interested and buy something from the advertiser - then nobody would ask any question. Please note that only unique impressions & clicks (within 24 hours) are counted. If clicks & impressions are made by bots then they can be partially filtered out. Fake clicks & impressions distort statistics and hurt advertisers that pay for clicks & impressions (it will be harder and more expensive for them to award honest affiliates). Though advertisers that pay for successful visits would even benefit from it, because they will have even stronger advantage in competition for good affiliates. I hope that more advertisers will pay for successful visits since it is much more efficient and eliminates incentive for generating fake clicks & impressions. |
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Hi! I see some inconsistency between my wallet and the affiliate page. I've got two affiliates: Tritonio: http://anonymousads.com/affiliate/137d3V7MhjnGShUiniyvV3bxMGqWG2FXJeFilosofiki: http://anonymousads.com/affiliate/1FgecxU7sTwgAfHLQJ6wZDUE3rUb5cbvY3As you see Tritonio has: 0.05782962 btc (3 withdrawals) and Filosofiki: 0.27553711 btc (4 withdrawals) Now check the related transactions on my wallet: Anonymous Ads (Tritonio)","137d3V7MhjnGShUiniyvV3bxMGqWG2FXJe","0.15071598" Anonymous Ads (Filosofiki.eu)","1FgecxU7sTwgAfHLQJ6wZDUE3rUb5cbvY3","0.07557349" Anonymous Ads (Tritonio)","137d3V7MhjnGShUiniyvV3bxMGqWG2FXJe","0.01101064" Anonymous Ads (Filosofiki.eu)","1FgecxU7sTwgAfHLQJ6wZDUE3rUb5cbvY3","0.07373893" Anonymous Ads (Tritonio)","137d3V7MhjnGShUiniyvV3bxMGqWG2FXJe","0.01071233", Anonymous Ads (Filosofiki.eu)","1FgecxU7sTwgAfHLQJ6wZDUE3rUb5cbvY3","0.01161536", In total Tritonio has about 0.17 BTC while filosofiki has: 0.16 BTC The reported sum on your site is about 0.33 and in my wallet it is again about 0.33. Did the addresses got mixed up somehow?? Up untill receiving the topmost payment everything looked normal. Then it is like the topmost payment was supposed to go to Filosofiki but went to Tritonio. Any ideas? Hi! According to http://blockexplorer.com/address/137d3V7MhjnGShUiniyvV3bxMGqWG2FXJe and http://blockexplorer.com/address/1FgecxU7sTwgAfHLQJ6wZDUE3rUb5cbvY3 everything is fine. Probably your bitcoin client just shows only one recipient for transaction (whereas "sendmany" transaction contains several recipients). |
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Bringing up text links again... It would be relatively easy for affiliates to create text-only links if the ids could be used, for example: http://anonymousads.com/go/<affiliate id>/<ad id>/ So any affiliate can easily pick the target site he wants and place a simple text link on a website/forum/email/etc. Actually if advertiser pays commission for successful visits and you want to show a text link for particular advertiser, then you can just put your bitcoin address into his/her URL. For example Bitcoin Darts accepts links of form " http://bitcoindarts.movoda.net/?partner=<bitcoin address here>". Just put your address there and you don't even need to use Anonymous Ads. So any affiliate can easily pick the target site he wants and place a simple text link on a website/forum/email/etc. It somewhat goes against your approach of a payment-balanced system though.
Yes, exactly. That is why instead of adding text links to Anonymous Ads I developed http://btcurl.com. Though btcurl is far from being complete, I have some plans on that project too It targets advertisers that don't want to track successful visits themselves. |
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How about adding a pending withdrawals section to the affiliate's page? So we know how much we have pending to be paid on the next payment.
Good idea. Also it would be nice to show transaction ids (I don't think affiliates should to examine database dumps to discover them). |
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Thanks for the reply. I think I may have read that but forgot  Let's hope they stay true to their word. Actually you don't have to trust it, this all is totally traceable. Just click your own banner and see the bitcoin address in the URL you arrive to. Send some btc on behalf of advertiser to that address and wait several hours, payment should appear in your wallet. Update: if it doesn't happen - please let me know |
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New features: - Min withdrawal - withdrawals won't be done if unspent amount is less than this value
- Max withdrawal & Withdrawal interval - schedule periodic withdrawals
- Callback Url - your script will be called when new bitcoins arrive
- API and php-example of organizing payment reception without bitcoind and pre-generated list of bitcoin addresses (btcrelay generates bitcoin addresses for you)
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I downloaded the most recent Opera and did a standard install on a clean XP without any adjustments. The cookie still gets set only partially.
...
Besides, the cookie stores successfully the session id, so you can as well handle the rest of the data server-side in the $_SESSION array after doing the session_start().
No need to store all the other information on the client side.
I decided to store this data on the client side because browser knows when it's session is over. And that is crucial to ensure that visitors get redirected to sites that correspond to the images they see in their browsers. I don't rely on server here because I am not sure how/when it clears session data after clients gets disconnected. I think I solved the issue (fixed cookie path). Please let me know if you still can reproduce it. Thank you very much for participation. |
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There were many fraudulent clicks, so I allowed myself to clean the stats a bit. I made some fixes in code and hope that there will be not that much fraudulent clicks in future.
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By the way, what's with the "Sorry, couldn't find the redirection link." message?
I get that every time I click the link in your sig.
Probably browser refuses cookies due to some security issues. I can't control browser's behavior, some users may have cookies disabled at all. I've implemented the work-around: if redirection link is not found, then user will be redirected to the list of ads for that affiliate (the wanted ad should be there). |
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That big thing at the moment are smart phones. The person who marriages advertising, smart phones and Bitcoin will be king of the mountain for years to come.
Yes, there is something here to think about ) |
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By the way, what's with the "Sorry, couldn't find the redirection link." message?
I get that every time I click the link in your sig.
It works for me. Does anybody else experience the same problem? Please PM me cookies of anonymousads.com, I'll try to understand what is happening. |
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Also AdSense pays me over £0.50 a click. I can't see this scheme paying as much per click but I think its ads are more relevant being BitCoin related.
It should be possible in the long run. Though I can't promise it will ever happen: all depends on advertisers and affiliates. Anonymous Ads just shows ads that are de-facto more profitable for each particular affiliate. So if advertiser pays to affiliates that attracted buyers, it is likely that those particular affiliates will show his/her ads more often and thus will earn more. Competition between advertisers should keep the rate reasonable. It is beneficial for advertisers too because they pay only for achieved results and get more impressions from affiliates that work best for them. It should be cheaper than paying for traffic (because inefficient and fraudulent traffic is not included in price). |
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I'm keeping a bit of an eye on this since the idea behind it is interesting and it's easy to implement. But as a webmaster there is no way to even roughly estimate your earnings.
The spread seems to get even bigger: user 51 has 1223 click, which earned him 0.00004360btc, while user 43 received 0.00092286btc for only 3 clicks. That's an about 21 times bigger payment for only approximately 0.25% of the clicks.
While I'm in no position to tell you how to run your project, I can say that webmasters want to be able to do some rough guessing. I know it's unfair to compare it to Adsense, but there I can do some estimations. Here I see differences of up to a factor of 8545, which, if applied to Adsense, would mean earning either $0.01 or $85.45 per click.
From my position as a webmaster it would help to have at least a guaranteed minimum earning, even if it's just 0.001btc per click.
Thanks for your feedback. User 51 has 1560 unique impressions and 1223 unique clicks. I don't want to say anything about user 51 since I don't know who he/she is and how did he achieve this ratio. But it looks suspicious and he/she could receive ban instead of money from Adsense. Guaranteed payments for clicks or impressions give strong incentive for fraudent clicks and impressions. If I knew the minimal cost of fraudent click or impression, maybe I could set up a guaranteed payments below that cost. |
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