[ANNOUNCEMENT] super easy bitcoin ads: PuppyTwist.com

[anzy]

Howdy again! John here from bc4wp.com.

We've just released a new bitcoin advertising network known as puppytwist.com and would love some feedback / participation / feature requests / questions.

I know a lot of you (and me) have at some point wanted to monetize your site traffic via bitcoin ads, but setting them up has been a crazy big hassle. If setup at all, you then realized how little money you got out of it.

Long story short, we built puppytwist.com not so much to profit, but to make for an as-simple-as-possible exchange of ads between publishers and advertisers. The payout % is quite high for publishers (currently 90%).

We'd love to hear some feedback right here in the forum (or on our contact form from the site), so let us know what you think : )



Link again: http://puppytwist.com

[instaBoost]

clean design! i'll have to do more testing later, be back with my analysis

[giantdragon]

The design reminded me Bitcoinadvertisers.com which have not so good reputation

[anzy]

clean design! i'll have to do more testing later, be back with my analysis

Thanks! We look forward to reading your review of it : )

The design reminded me Bitcoinadvertisers.com which have not so good reputation

I see what you mean. We've checked out a few competitors and what they were doin right, and what they were doing wrong so we could improve & find the gaps of what people wanted that wasn't being provided.

Hopefully you give us a fair shot - would love to read your thoughts & review as well!

[Raoul Duke]

You should not use publishers bitcoin addresses in the ads themselves.

[anzy]

You should not use publishers bitcoin addresses in the ads themselves.

Excellent suggestion! Will implement that immediately : )

[anzy]

Alrighty, bitcoin addresses have been removed from the ad embed code and replaced with internal IDs. It is also backwards-compatible with any already-embedded ads.

Thank you for the suggestion psy, any more are very much welcome : )

[anzy]

bump

[anzy]

bump

[sega01]

This is very cool. Site looks great and the interface is sleek. I know the advertising base will get better and better as more people start using it, too.

I may try to advertise and possibly even put an ad banner on one of my sites :-). To clarify, clicks cost you your bid amount, and impressions without clicks cost nothing? The click through ratios reported are pretty impressive.

Did notice one bug, too. Under stats pages, the source domain's <a> tag is set to just the domain without http://. The browser then treats it as a local link off the site, and so is broken. Just need to add http:// as a prefix you should be golden. Would also be awesome if you added IPv6 support. Noticed that you're probably using Rackspace Cloud Servers. The Open Cloud/Openstack servers should come with an IPv6 address already. Pretty much just need to add an AAAA record and test it.

Sincerely,
Teran

[anzy]

This is very cool. Site looks great and the interface is sleek. I know the advertising base will get better and better as more people start using it, too.

I may try to advertise and possibly even put an ad banner on one of my sites :-). To clarify, clicks cost you your bid amount, and impressions without clicks cost nothing? The click through ratios reported are pretty impressive.

Did notice one bug, too. Under stats pages, the source domain's <a> tag is set to just the domain without http://. The browser then treats it as a local link off the site, and so is broken. Just need to add http:// as a prefix you should be golden. Would also be awesome if you added IPv6 support. Noticed that you're probably using Rackspace Cloud Servers. The Open Cloud/Openstack servers should come with an IPv6 address already. Pretty much just need to add an AAAA record and test it.

Sincerely,
Teran

Doh! You got me; just changed how the source works (used to store full url, truncated on stats page but now truncates during storage) and forgot to update that - thanks for the heads up!

I'll look into the IPv6 support, but before I start Googling - do tell it's purpose & benefit : )

[anzy]

This is very cool. Site looks great and the interface is sleek. I know the advertising base will get better and better as more people start using it, too.

I may try to advertise and possibly even put an ad banner on one of my sites :-). To clarify, clicks cost you your bid amount, and impressions without clicks cost nothing? The click through ratios reported are pretty impressive.

Thank you for the kind words, they are significantly appreciated : )

Oh and yes, impressions are free. All impressions and clicks are unique in sets of: ad + ip + day

[sega01]

Okay, so I created an ad and a publishing ID. Actually both at the same page load to test, and it seems fine. I put the ads on two of my sites. I'm normally fairly anti-advertising, but I really want to see Bitcoin take off. And these ads are not obtrusive at all; they blend in well while still sticking out, if that makes sense.

However, I did run into a problem. My Bitcoin payment is not confirming on the site. It keeps retrying every 15 seconds and does not register that I've sent it a payment. I already have five confirmations on it today, as well. Here's the transaction: http://blockchain.info/tx/648f1a99783e3994e3cbace71e535bc4fb9e0a05da0b39977d4d6626a7f604c5

Did I do something wrong, or maybe there's a bug in the code somewhere?

Doh! You got me; just changed how the source works (used to store full url, truncated on stats page but now truncates during storage) and forgot to update that - thanks for the heads up!

I'll look into the IPv6 support, but before I start Googling - do tell it's purpose & benefit : )

Awesome that you got it fixed so quickly!

So right now, IPv6 isn't too much of a big deal. But IPv4 addresses are running out and will altogether at some point. There's not an IP for every person alive, and you tend to need at least that with the way people use them. Although NATing helps and what not, IPv6 really is the best answer at the moment for many reasons. If you support IPv6, anyone only on IPv6 (rare, but possible) can still reach your site. And for me, I try to have fully IPv6 capable sites, so linking in content that is also IPv6 ready is a huge plus. In a couple years the addresses will start getting rare enough that most VPSs probably will come without them, and they'll get rarer and rarer. I think the sale price of IP blocks over the years says a lot.

Still, it's nothing huge. Just would be nice to have :-).

Also, in your publisher code you use src="//puppytwist.com/etc". Does // mean load on same protocol as the source page? It seems to work, but I thought it was a bug at first. I've never seen that before.

Thanks,
Teran

[anzy]

However, I did run into a problem. My Bitcoin payment is not confirming on the site. It keeps retrying every 15 seconds and does not register that I've sent it a payment. I already have five confirmations on it today, as well. Here's the transaction: http://blockchain.info/tx/648f1a99783e3994e3cbace71e535bc4fb9e0a05da0b39977d4d6626a7f604c5

Did I do something wrong, or maybe there's a bug in the code somewhere?

Fixed! Thanks for being patient with it.

Also, in your publisher code you use src="//puppytwist.com/etc". Does // mean load on same protocol as the source page? It seems to work, but I thought it was a bug at first. I've never seen that before.

Doing that makes it worth on both http:// and https:// in case someone puts them on a secure page. Excellent feedback so far, I truly do appreciate it!

[anzy]

Ah, looks like the payment receive API for blockchain.info is down? Anywho, I'll manually approve (probably within 60 seconds) any new advertisers until it's automated again.

[anzy]

All good now with the purchase API, was just a big delay.

Added publisher "recent clicks" stats in the sidebar of the stats page here: http://puppytwist.com/stats/

[anzy]

bump : )

[anzy]

Updated the system to blacklist some obvisouly-suspicious sites generating traffic.

Just went through the logs and it definitely seems like people are paying for services that get mass amounts of impressions and auto-redirect to a destination. While none of these have actually generated any clicks, we went ahead and banned them from the stats.

Click through rates and overall stats should look significantly more accurate now : )

[anzy]

bump 

[anzy]

Another round of cleaning has been done, with roughly 50 clicks & commissions removed from the system due to fraud detection.

On that note, we've now made it so the system will now multiple clicks from the same ip on the same day from the same source. It used to be set to the same ip on the same day from the same ad, but some folks decided to constantly click through all the ads that would show up; this isn't how advertising should work : )

For any publishers, your remaining click totals have automatically been adjusted. We'll continue to weed out fraudulent clicks and put systems in place to ensure top quality in the traffic being purchased.