Thanks for your feedback. This definitely needs to be fixed/improved.

We are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network, these are just the rough estimates. The underlying principle is simple:

1. Advertiser creates an advertising campaign, selects targeting criteria, sets daily budget, deposits funds.

2. Our algorithm spends advertiser's funds on ad units (that fit targeting criteria) with respect to their weights (calculated based on unique impressions and other metrics).

3. Advertiser gets a share of impressions from each ad unit with respect to amount of money spent on it. E. g. if your campaign is responsible for X% of ad unit's earnings then you will get X% of that ad unit's traffic (no matter how much you pay in terms of BTC and how many impressions that ad unit generates).

This explanation is simplified, in reality there are many parameters that make the algorithm too complicated to discuss it here.

However the service is transparent, you can get pretty realistic expectations if you watch the network-wide stats (http://a-ads.com/stats) and stats of other active campaigns (http://a-ads.com/campaigns/). You can also see the stats of each ad unit and the share each advertiser has on it, e. g. https://a-ads.com/ad_units/1/campaigns

I'd advice to start an advertising campaign with small daily budget and gradually increase it if it goes fine. Just make sure you don't set unreasonably high daily budget if your targeting is narrow.

If you can track the performance of your campaign and make server-side HTTP call to reward efficient traffic sources, you might be interested in this offer: http://blog.anonymousads.com/2015/04/receive-free-traffic-pay-after-you-get.html

I have an ever-growing list of cold wallets with thousands of bitcoin addresses in each of them. Most of them are probably empty and won't ever be used, but still I'd like to check the sum of bitcoins they hold. What's the best (cheapest and easiest) way of doing it?

My first thought was to import them as watch-only addresses to the bitcoin core instance that is running on my server. But I am afraid it may affect the server performance and I don't want to risk it.

So I should probably set up a separate server for this purpose and download the blockchain again.

Or is there a way to check the total balance of hundreds of thousands of bitcoin addresses with some free online service or a light wallet?

We are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network. It is possible that ad unit sends customers to our advertisers without generating any unique (in terms of our network) impressions or clicks at all. If such an ad unit receives rewards from advertisers that use revenue sharing model then it will have infinite CPM and CPC.

Having said that, I admit that the estimates you show look suspicious. I will investigate it, thanks for reporting!

Thanks for your question. Frankly speaking it is not easy to answer this question, the system is definitely far from being perfect, sorry for this.

Our CPM estimates are based on the globally unique impressions because it is harder to manipulate them (one IP address can't generate more than 1 unique impression per 24 hours in the scope of the whole network). According to our public stats, only ~1 impression out of ~46 is counted as unique (while for impressions this ratio is 1:2).

Some sites generate a lot of non-unique impressions (and unique clicks), but amount of unique impressions is low and thus CPM (as calculated by our system) is high.

By filtering them out you increase the amount of unique impressions you can get for the same money, but it doesn't necessarily mean that amount of non-unique impressions and unique clicks will increase.

Moreover, we have captchas to filter out fake clicks. So if you concentrate your advertising budgets on the cheap traffic sources, you might get a lot of impressions but less clicks.

Hi, thanks for your question.

Here it is: https://a-ads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=%22btc-up.blogspot.com%22&filter[]=ad_units

You can also hover the banner on your site, click the a-ads logo -> click "Your ad here" -> click "Ad Unit #105500" to see your ad unit's page at a-ads.

Hi, thanks for your question. That is probably due to the lack of the unique traffic. We are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network, but when there is no unique traffic, your don't get a share of the advertising budgets. We display free affiliate ads because it is the last resort to monetize your traffic. Affiliate rewards are currently ~4% of all earnings.

I agree, it would be nice to see it evolving in time.

Though I removed the created_at and updated_at fields from the signatures table in order to improve the anonymity, so it is a little harder to implement now 

Also it would be nice to have some sorting options (not only by "argument validity", but by sum of bitcoins voted or by recent activity).


I didn't quite understand your question, but it is open source, so you can probably find an answer.

oh, wow, big guys are voting! http://bitcoinocracy.com/

I mean that you can use same ad unit on multiple pages of your site (as long as its domain matches the domain name of the URL specified upon ad unit creation).

For example if you create an ad unit with URL: http://example.org/welcome.html, then you can use it on any pages of example.org domain (but it must be present on the  welcome.html page as well). If you embed it to some other domain, then impressions from that other domain won't be counted as unique.

We don't have any specific rules for publishers, but we try to make our money distribution algorithm more or less fair. There is probably no much sense to encourage anybody to click your ad unit since we don't pay per click. Just make sure that:
1) your ad unit code can be detected by our script on the specified URL
2) your ad unit generates unique impressions that come from the same domain
3) if you have clicks - most of them are human and reach the advertisers' sites
4) your ad unit is visible and has a reasonable CTR

If your visitors click ads but don't eventually reach the advertisers' sites, then your ad unit might be considered a poor traffic source and earn peanuts.

As for revenue sharing, you can make 2 ad units for the same page that withdraw to different bitcoin addresses. E. g. ad unit A could generate income for the lottery, and ad unit B - to your wallet.

You could display ad unit A 90% of time and ad unit B 10% of time. Or you could display both of them 100% of time, but 90% of time ad unit A would be displayed first, and 10% of time ad unit B would be displayed first (ad unit that loads first gets most of the unique impressions).

That is a good way of doing it because it is transparent. Anybody can refresh the page and collect the stats about percentage of ad units display, and anybody can check the ad unit's financial stats since our service is transparent. So the money collection part of your lottery would be more or less verifiable.

Sorry, I didn't quite understand your question. What is lottery ads?

Yes, but it counts only clicks and impressions that come from unique IPs in the scope of the whole advertising network. Also, we are neither pay-per-click nor pay-per-impression, so it is just an estimate that fluctuates over time.

Fixed. Thanks again for the bug report!

Sorry, it looks like a bug, thanks for reporting!

See the network-wide stats:

It should be something like: 1.21 btc / 8160 uniques = 0.00015125 per unique click (~ 0.06 usd per click).

PS: please note that we are not pay-per-click network anyway, that's just the estimates, see http://blog.anonymousads.com/2014/08/why-am-i-not-paid-for-clicks-what-is.html

Hi. Thanks for your question. We count each IP only once per 24 hours (in the scope of the whole network, i. e. no matter which publisher served it). It shouldn't be a problem since we are not pay-per-impression network, unique impressions is just a metric to determine the relative size of ad units. See http://blog.anonymousads.com/2014/08/why-am-i-not-paid-for-clicks-what-is.html for details.

Thanks to the author of the argument:

http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/this-site-should-filter-out-0-vote-entries-to-remove-spam-and-display-arguments-separately

--- I followed this suggestion to display arguments separately (and added pagination).

Not sure whether there is any sense in filtering out the 0-vote entries since they will be displayed in the end of the list (and eventually moved to the later pages). At the same time the new unvoted entries might benefit from being listed here.

New look:

Sorry, it happens time to time It doesn't affect ad rotation though. We plan to upgrade our web server in a few days. Hopefully it will better handle the load.

Please give me a link to the page that has an ad unit that is not being displayed.

It should work with any browser unless AdBlock is enabled. It doesn't even have a Javascript. Plain HTML+CSS.

Wow, owners of 143.50137874 BTC support the idea, that's inspiring, thanks!



So what's the next step?

User accounts and bulk signing as proposed in https://github.com/arsenische/bitcoinocracy/issues/5 ?

Enable users to attach links (or even files?) to the arguments upon their creation?

Enable users to define the context (or scope) for the arguments upon their creation?

Integrate with twitter to automatically tweet the new arguments?

anything else?