[ANN] a-ads.com: Bitcoin advertising network. Advertise now!

[arsenische]

Thanks mate, I have another couple of questions -

1. If I create an ad unit 'other', can I add it along with an existing ad unit 'Site' on the same site? By can I add, I mean does one visitor count towards both these ad units in impressions?
2. What if I create two ad units, both of type 'Site' but of different sizes. Is it fair game them, as in, will you count a visitor towards both the impressions?

We count a visitor as unique only when it is the first time we see his/her IP during last 24 hours. You may have as much ad untis on your page as you want, but unique impression will be counted only for one of them (the one that loads first).

Thanks for your questions, I think I have answered both.

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[ruletheworld]

Thanks mate, I have another couple of questions -

1. If I create an ad unit 'other', can I add it along with an existing ad unit 'Site' on the same site? By can I add, I mean does one visitor count towards both these ad units in impressions?
2. What if I create two ad units, both of type 'Site' but of different sizes. Is it fair game them, as in, will you count a visitor towards both the impressions?

We count a visitor as unique only when it is the first time we see his/her IP during last 24 hours. You may have as much ad untis on your page as you want, but unique impression will be counted only for one of them (the one that loads first).

Thanks for your questions, I think I have answered both.

Yes. Just so you know, I am having much better luck overall with this ad unit and plan on keeping it longer on my blog. Also, don't be surprised if you see yourself mentioned on some of the more mainstream blogs

[BobMarley]

Cool wish you could create a group of adds that pay at the same time

[antiycda]

hi there

all payment are under unprocessed

Last Withdrawal: *** ( *** unprocessed)

[arsenische]

hi there

all payment are under unprocessed

Last Withdrawal: *** ( *** unprocessed)

Sorry about that, we are experiencing technical problems. Please don't worry, should be resolved soon. And all the deposits/withdrawals will be processed. Thanks for your patience & message!

[arsenische]

hi there

all payment are under unprocessed

Last Withdrawal: *** ( *** unprocessed)

Sorry about that, we are experiencing technical problems. Please don't worry, should be resolved soon. And all the deposits/withdrawals will be processed. Thanks for your patience & message!

The problems have been resolved. Everything should work now (it may still take up to 2 hours to process the delayed withdrawals, but they should work).

[DobZombie]

10 382 168 
impressions/day from 319K unique IPs

THIS WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE.

If I'm reading this right, every single person sees 30 ads per day. Each?

I call bullshit.  I think web crawlers maybe skewing your view?

[arsenische]

10 382 168 
impressions/day from 319K unique IPs

THIS WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE.

If I'm reading this right, every single person sees 30 ads per day. Each?

I call bullshit.  I think web crawlers maybe skewing your view?

That's just an estimated amount of impressions we serve and the amount of IPs we see per day. Of course some %% of impressions are generated by bots or traffic exchange networks, that is why we count unique IPs separately. You can browse the stats of ad units and see that they have different ratios. E. g. forums may generate plenty of non-unique impressions for each unique IP per day. Also a significant part of our audience is somehow affiliated with Bitcoin, so they probably visit same sites from a limited number of IPs.

[arsenische]

Is there an issue with ad creation? I can't seem to make a new ad?

Do you have AdBlock enabled? Please disable it, it may hide some form fields.

[ruletheworld]

Are the payments being delayed now? I always had the payment processed immediately but today the counter changed from 0.01BTC back to 0 but that wasn't processed and I wasn't paid yet.

[arsenische]

Are the payments being delayed now? I always had the payment processed immediately but today the counter changed from 0.01BTC back to 0 but that wasn't processed and I wasn't paid yet.

Everything seems to be working normally. It may take up to ~1 hour to process the withdrawal. Please let me know if it won't happen. Thanks for your question!

[ruletheworld]

Are the payments being delayed now? I always had the payment processed immediately but today the counter changed from 0.01BTC back to 0 but that wasn't processed and I wasn't paid yet.

Everything seems to be working normally. It may take up to ~1 hour to process the withdrawal. Please let me know if it won't happen. Thanks for your question!

Got it! It took a little longer than usual, just wanted to know if things changed on your site.

[toffoo]

Hi guys, I decided to type up and share my first experiences using your ad network.  It seems like a great idea and I'd like to see it succeed.

I decided to try your network for a few reasons: 1.) you accept bitcoin!  2.) I like the anon/privacy aspect of your service  3.) I saw your site mentioned here on bitcointalk and also involved in the European bitcoin conference  4.) I wanted to test advertising a gambling-related site, and I see many ad networks do not support that type of link.

My main concern with using this network was click fraud.  I know this a major issue with all internet advertising (I recently read this:    A quarter of online ad traffic is fraudulent / The Amount of Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your Mind) but I was especially concerned using this network, because bitcoin and anonymous seem to attract the worst of the scammers.  I have some confidence that big advertisers like Google can do some things to fight this, but less confident that new/small networks like this one can do anything.

I used a link-shortener that gives me some tracking/analytics as my advertised URL in an attempt to audit where some of these clicks are coming from.

So here's some "results" from my first campaign:

I've just shut it down and requested a refund of my remaining balance because my guess is that nearly 100% of the clicks I paid for were fraudulent.

I turned the campaign on before I went to bed last night, now turned it off this morning, and paid approximately 0.05 BTC while it ran.

I had three places to measure "metrics" on how this fraud campaign was doing: 1.) a-ads.com itself said I got 1,039 clicks, 2.) the link-shortener analytics said 2,437 clicks, and 3.) the destination gambling site registered 1,293 new cookies, but apparently ZERO new "conversions" (i.e. someone actually depositing bitcoins and gambling).

Here's some analytics from the link-shortener on where most of these clicks came from:

Referrers
amnhac.co.vu       674
tinhot.co.vu          521
tieuthuyet.co.vu    382
ad.a-ads.com       300
briankt.co.vu        194
stevenkt.co.vu      153
sharetut.co.vu      101
emtoikhong.co.vu   98
direct (email, IM, apps)   13

If you take a look at any of those .vu referrer pages, it seems that some "clever entrepreneur / scammer" has been gaming your system.

So in conclusion, great idea, I would love to see it work, but I will not be attempting any further campaigns here until I have some kind of assurance that I'm accomplishing something besides making professional scammers slightly richer.

[arsenische]

Hi guys, I decided to type up and share my first experiences using your ad network.  It seems like a great idea and I'd like to see it succeed.

I decided to try your network for a few reasons: 1.) you accept bitcoin!  2.) I like the anon/privacy aspect of your service  3.) I saw your site mentioned here on bitcointalk and also involved in the European bitcoin conference  4.) I wanted to test advertising a gambling-related site, and I see many ad networks do not support that type of link.

My main concern with using this network was click fraud.  I know this a major issue with all internet advertising (I recently read this:    A quarter of online ad traffic is fraudulent / The Amount of Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your Mind) but I was especially concerned using this network, because bitcoin and anonymous seem to attract the worst of the scammers.  I have some confidence that big advertisers like Google can do some things to fight this, but less confident that new/small networks like this one can do anything.

I used a link-shortener that gives me some tracking/analytics as my advertised URL in an attempt to audit where some of these clicks are coming from.

So here's some "results" from my first campaign:

I've just shut it down and requested a refund of my remaining balance because my guess is that nearly 100% of the clicks I paid for were fraudulent.

I turned the campaign on before I went to bed last night, now turned it off this morning, and paid approximately 0.05 BTC while it ran.

I had three places to measure "metrics" on how this fraud campaign was doing: 1.) a-ads.com itself said I got 1,039 clicks, 2.) the link-shortener analytics said 2,437 clicks, and 3.) the destination gambling site registered 1,293 new cookies, but apparently ZERO new "conversions" (i.e. someone actually depositing bitcoins and gambling).

Here's some analytics from the link-shortener on where most of these clicks came from:

Referrers
amnhac.co.vu       674
tinhot.co.vu          521
tieuthuyet.co.vu    382
ad.a-ads.com       300
briankt.co.vu        194
stevenkt.co.vu      153
sharetut.co.vu      101
emtoikhong.co.vu   98
direct (email, IM, apps)   13

If you take a look at any of those .vu referrer pages, it seems that some "clever entrepreneur / scammer" has been gaming your system.

So in conclusion, great idea, I would love to see it work, but I will not be attempting any further campaigns here until I have some kind of assurance that I'm accomplishing something besides making professional scammers slightly richer.

Thank you very much for this research.

You are right, filtering the traffic is not trivial for small companies. And we don't do it. What we do is we shift the responsibility & control towards advertisers as they are the only ones that know if their advertising campaigns are efficient. We don't charge per click or per impression. If one generates tons of clicks - that doesn't mean he receives tons of money.

We just redistribute advertising budgets among ad units with respect to their globally-unique traffic. Advertisers get a proportional share of impressions in return. Advertisers can select specific traffic sources they pay to. In fact they have full control over their money via Goal Tracking API (though it appeared to be complicated, so we plan to simplify it somehow).

The idea is that you start an advertising campaign, track efficiency of ad units, filter out the ones that are inefficient or fraudulent, reward the ones that are good and generate registrations/sales/deep views (and thus get more impressions from them). That's up to you. Just enable the checkbox "Goal tracking" in the campaign's options and you'll receive a GET parameter (that identifies campaign and ad unit) with each visitor.

TL;DR: So, yes, scammers will always generate fake traffic, but we don't pay per click. Advertisers can pay selectively to the ones that work good for them. You can enable goal traffic for your campaign to track the traffic sources and reward the ones that are good.

Thanks again for your time & feedback. This is a very common problem for our new advertisers. We plan to make it easier for advertisers to pay selectively and to blacklist ad units they don't like.

[arsenische]

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[LennonNZ]

How do you know what a Unique Impression is. As I have lots (Well all of them) of mobile users a lot of carriers NAT them to the same IP Address.

Do you set a cookie or alike or do you just unique the ip address (not very good)

[LennonNZ]

Just a comment..

I have a 300x250 advert and it shows 3 text ads. At the moment 2 of them are the same all the time. Maybe you can change it so it only shows unique adverts and doesn't show the same advert twice/three times.

[LennonNZ]

Just one more thing..

Are the places which the adverts linked to actually looked at. I can see 1 advert at the moment.. all it goes to is another page with a single advert on it.

For an advertising network to go well it has to have quality advertisers..

[LennonNZ]

And.... (yes I'm posting as I'm checking things out)

the Quality of pages where your adverts are on. Do you check them?

http://phivan.yolasite.com

There is no content except adverts! If someone is searching for a certain website to place their adverts on .. its near impossible.

http://b1batdau.jav-heaven.com

I didn't know you could have that many adverts on 1 page.

+ lots more..

Maybe you should have quality checks/rules about other adverts on pages.. actually having some decent content...

[arsenische]

Thanks for your comments, LennonNZ!

How do you know what a Unique Impression is. As I have lots (Well all of them) of mobile users a lot of carriers NAT them to the same IP Address.

We count globally unique IPs per 24 hour period. That means if we saw this IP during last 24 hours, it won't be counted as unique (even if that impression was not from your site).

It shouldn't be a problem since we are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression. We distribute advertisers' money among publishers with respect to their unique traffic. So absolute numbers are not important (only the relative ones are) and all the publishers are in equal position.

I have a 300x250 advert and it shows 3 text ads. At the moment 2 of them are the same all the time. Maybe you can change it so it only shows unique adverts and doesn't show the same advert twice/three times.

Probably that means that advertisers that paid to your site don't have graphic banners of 300x250 currently.  Probability of each ad being shown on publishers' site depends on amount of money paid by advertiser to that site. If there are only 2 advertisers for this ad unit then there is not much we can do about it. Though there are 21 active advertising campaigns currently, so it is a bit strange. What's your ad unit id?

Are the places which the adverts linked to actually looked at. I can see 1 advert at the moment.. all it goes to is another page with a single advert on it.

Yes, ads are pre-moderated. We ban obviously harmful content, and flag controversial one as such in order to protect publishers from ads that they wouldn't allow. However this process is subjective, so if you feel we made a mistake - please let us know.

the Quality of pages where your adverts are on. Do you check them?
...
There is no content except adverts! If someone is searching for a certain website to place their adverts on .. its near impossible.

No, we are not restrictive towards our publishers, we don't evaluate the quality of publishers' sites and traffic they generate. We kind of shift this responsibility to advertisers.

Advertisers can either find particular sites in catalog (or using search feature), or start a massive advertising campaign with enabled goal tracking and find out which traffic sources are efficient for them. Then advertisers can use an API to reward efficient ad units in order to get more traffic from them. Alternatively they can start a new campaign with ad units that work good for them.

However I agree that catalog is not convenient. There are many useful sites in it, but they are hard to find among all that trash. We plan to change it.

Thanks again for your time & feedback!