There are many things that can be done to improve the pyramid, some of them were mentioned earlier in this thread, some of them are trivial to do. The Pyramid is still in Beta and rules are a subject to change, that gives some flexibility.

I am pretty sure it is possible to get more traction for this project. The problem is I am not sure I want this to happen.

So I am thinking about selling the project (domain name, source codes, database dump, bitcoin keys if needed) to somebody who wants it and to distribute the money to the pyramid members.

Here is how it could be done:

1. create an auction for Y days with start price X btc, wait for auction to complete and for winner to pay bitcoins
2. process the database and calculate the USD value of each member's deposit (using the historical average BTCUSD price for the day of deposit)
3. distribute bitcoins received from an auction winner to withdrawal addresses of pyramid members with respect to USD value they deposited
4. decrease withdrawal threshold from 0.021 btc to 0.00021 btc to trigger payouts of unspent balances
5. pass the domain name, source code, database dump and bitcoin addresses to the auction winner

Do you think it is a good plan?

What are the good values for X and Y?

Should there be any additional conditions for the auction? (e. g. should the auction participants promise to keep the service alive, to preserve the userbase, to preserve the pyramid ads, etc?)

Thanks for your question. Please see brief instructions here: http://blog.anonymousads.com/2014/03/new-feature-sign-in-with-your-bitcoin.html (placed the link to the sign in page).

Thanks.

Due to a bug we displayed errors instead of recently activated ads. The bug has already been fixed. We'll fund affected campaigns to compensate it. Sorry for inconvenience.

Update: deposited funds to affected campaigns https://blockchain.info/tx/1ffb4d8acf6c890f4854d5c1e3004eb3465cdc37f18e08ca0f15f739c6c84c6e

So did anybody check whether this prediction appeared to be correct?

Our clicks stats from 21st to 25th of November are invalid: due to a recently introduced bug (that was fixed today) we didn't count clicks correctly during that period. Shouldn't be a serious problem since we are not pay-per-click service, but sorry for inconvenience.

Everything seems to be fine except deficit of paying advertisers.

Advertisers, this is a business opportunity for you, cheap traffic right now!

According to my data our ad delivery service is pretty reliable. But one of our publishers is complaining that our ads are often "down". Is there anybody else who is experiencing similar problems?

Thanks for your question.

If you hover column names, you'll notice that Clicks and Impressions columns show non-unique clicks and impressions, whereas Statistics columns shows charts for unique clicks and impressions.

Clicks/impressions columns represent amounts of clicks/impressions during a month, but the table is sorted by amount of clicks during a day (it allows to quickly identify and block main sources of recent load on your site).

We'll work to improve the interface, I've added the feature request about custom sorting to our issue tracker.

Deployed few new servers to better handle the load (~100M impressions from over 1.3M IPs served daily).

We are being criticized for unsolicited email spam.

Just to clear the things out: we do not spam and never intended to. Perhaps in the early days of the project we sent out disturbing notifications about microdonations, but that was fixed long ago, just see the algorithm here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/blob/master/app/models/tip.rb#L115-L126

We send emails only to public email addresses of contributors who received tips for their contribution and only when ALL of the following conditions are met:

• contributor's balance is above the threshold
• contributor didn't specify his or her withdrawal address
• contributor didn't unsubscribe
• contributor wasn't notified during last 30 days -- btw if contributor doesn't specify bitcoin address during 30 days, tips will be returned to donation pool anyway
• project maintainer didn't disable notification for contributors of his or her project

Email recipient can explicitly unsubscribe or just ignore the message.

If there is any victim of our spam please create a ticket at github with facts. So far most of the criticism comes from people who never got a satoshi a single email from us!

Update: just placed this explanation here so that everybody could comment.

Update2: temporary disabled all email notifications, discussing fundamental issues: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157

Don't ask, model it yourself: http://worldbitcoinnetwork.com/BitcoinPriceModel-Alpha.html

How did you come with perpetual annual 10% tax? I think this is quite a pessimistic expectation.

But even it it is correct, don't forget that global economy grows.

Let's say it grows ~5% per year and this growth is not absorbed by monetary emission, so the tax becomes ~5%, that is much, much better than in many countries. Do you feel it is sustainable?

Oh, and don't forget about few percents you implicitly pay everytime you use your credit card (even when you pay in cash, it is priced in!)

Btw, at these early days bitcoin economy is supposed to grow much faster than 10%/year, so it is not inflationary, it is deflationary by nature.

Current price ignores it though because it is driven by speculators' expectations and it will continue to do so until Bitcoin becomes mature or vanishes.

Do you believe this activity is related to tip4commit?

Perhaps we could reward for 1 commit per day only, would it fix the problem?


Interesting idea, could reward contributors based on their score... But sounds complicated to set up and probably will severely reduce number of projects.



Thanks for kind words, but not everybody likes it, so think twice before doing it.


No, it's not, sorry.

It's weird, nobody used this feature so far. Either we do a good job moderating ads and publishers don't want to ban them, or they just didn't notice this feature.


Thanks for your feedback!

It is sorted by clicks so that you can ban ad units that generate too much useless traffic for your site.

Here are the current means for advertiser to get to know where his traffic comes from:

1. If you enable "Goal tracking" option in the "Info" tab of your campaign then you will get ID of traffic source with every visitor (so you can track on your side which traffic sources attract useful traffic).

2. In the advertiser's "Targeting" tab you can see the categories and quality range of ad units for your campaign. You can check catalog to check what's inside.

3. You can just visit any ad unit and see if your ad is there and what's the percentage of its traffic you get. E. g. here is the list of advertisers for ad unit #1: http://a-ads.com/ad_units/1/campaigns

If you have a specific use case/interface in mind, please describe it, we plan to improve it.

New feature: publishers can ban ads

We are having temporary SSL-related problems on our front end, working to fix it. Ad rotation is not affected. fixed

Thanks for your message.

Someone generated too much traffic to our main site. I think it is fixed now.

Ad rotation not affected.

Update: hm, looks like there is still a problem with the main site. Working on it. done

Thank for precious feedback and manual. There is a minor inaccuracy there:


You earn 50% from advertisers attracted by you, it doesn't depend on whether they advertise on your particular ad unit or not. Each ad unit is our affiliate, so if someone comes though your affiliate link (that is present in ad unit code) and creates an ad, you get 50% of fees collected from campaigns of that ad.

Thanks for your feedback.

I think your question is answered in publisher's section of our faq:



Thanks for your question. CPM rate depends on particular ad unit, ad and market situation. You can see aggregated stats here: https://a-ads.com/stats or see the stats of particular active campaigns (https://a-ads.com/campaigns/) and ad units to get an idea.