Free or cheap advertising service

[Lionel]

Hi,
i own an advertising site which is an experiment: http://www.stealthepixels.com

You can get little ad banners for free or for cheap.
Banners never expire, they will be shown forever.
If you are the first who wants a banner you get it for free, otherwise another person has the banner, but ... you can "steal" it from him.
How? By paying us 0.01$ more than the price payed by him. BTC/LTC also accepted.

So for example he got the banner for 0.50$, you have to pay 0.51$ to get it.

The site will be online forever, so if you have a banner and noboby steals it from you, it will show your ads forever.

I'm writing this thread to do a little beta test: what do you think about it?

- the concept, could this idea work?
- the implementation, is it comprehensive and attractive?
- give me more suggestions if you want

Thank you

[superresistant]

Genius idea.

[raaawr]

I think it works, wasnt there a site called the million dollar site with this same concept a couple of years ago?

[jmiles337]

Wow, I've never seen anything like this before. Seems like a very good idea to me, but why would anyone visit this site, thus viewing my ad? Just wondering about why anyone would have an incentive to go to a site just to view adds :s (I am very interested in getting my ad up soon btw ^_^ almost done with my site.

[Lionel]

I think it works, wasnt there a site called the million dollar site with this same concept a couple of years ago?

Yes this is a pixel advertising site inspired by The million dollar homepage with some added functionalities.
The milliondollarhomepage had about 100 clone sites but they all were very ugly and amateur compared to the original one.

We have tried to do a site in the same category but with added original extensions and that looks pretty and well-finished, not amateur like those clones.

Wow, I've never seen anything like this before. Seems like a very good idea to me, but why would anyone visit this site, thus viewing my ad? Just wondering about why anyone would have an incentive to go to a site just to view adds :s (I am very interested in getting my ad up soon btw ^_^ almost done with my site.

About this point i forgot: we are also committing ourselves to do proper SEO/link building/promotion to be well visible on google, so your advertising is not placed forever on a PR0 site. PageRank and traffic will grow.
That is another difference with the Milliondollarhomepage clones.

But maybe there is still the problem you said: why people should enter a site with only banners??
You make me think now and i accept any suggestions about this point.
For now i can say: people maybe will not hang around to a site like this but your site will have one more link that google sees. This is still not sufficient though...

[countryfree]

When I'm buying an advertising campaign, I want to know what I'm buying. I can buy 5,000 clicks or 1,000,000 pages views, and I can choose the audience, but if I don't know precisely what I'm getting, and without any guarantee on how long I'll have it, I guess your service has to be free. Forever.

[Lionel]

When I'm buying an advertising campaign, I want to know what I'm buying. I can buy 5,000 clicks or 1,000,000 pages views, and I can choose the audience, but if I don't know precisely what I'm getting, and without any guarantee on how long I'll have it, I guess your service has to be free. Forever.

"without any guarantee on how long I'll have it"

Look at the milliondollarhomepage: it has been online since 2005 and it will likely be online for the decades to come. It didn't guarantee it will be online forever, they only declared that but they still got their banner filled by advertisers! Yeah it maintained its promise because it is still online after 8-9 years, but there was no guarantee on this in 2005.

"I want to know what I'm buying"

There are a lot of professional advertising services that offer you the guarantee you get 5,000 clicks from the country you choose etc., but there is a huge difference in price.
My service has the same philosophy as the milliondollarhomepage: no guaranteed but very very cheap (actually far cheaper than MDH).
Again, the MDH got their banner filled despite they did not guarantee 5,000 clicks to advertisers, who paid even 1$ per pixel that is very costly!
If all the people think like you, why in the world they bought pixels on MDH at that crazy price?

[countryfree]

When I'm buying an advertising campaign, I want to know what I'm buying. I can buy 5,000 clicks or 1,000,000 pages views, and I can choose the audience, but if I don't know precisely what I'm getting, and without any guarantee on how long I'll have it, I guess your service has to be free. Forever.

"without any guarantee on how long I'll have it"

Look at the milliondollarhomepage: it has been online since 2005 and it will likely be online for the decades to come. It didn't guarantee it will be online forever, they only declared that but they still got their banner filled by advertisers! Yeah it maintained its promise because it is still online after 8-9 years, but there was no guarantee on this in 2005.

"I want to know what I'm buying"

There are a lot of professional advertising services that offer you the guarantee you get 5,000 clicks from the country you choose etc., but there is a huge difference in price.
My service has the same philosophy as the milliondollarhomepage: no guaranteed but very very cheap (actually far cheaper than MDH).
Again, the MDH got their banner filled despite they did not guarantee 5,000 clicks to advertisers, who paid even 1$ per pixel that is very costly!
If all the people think like you, why in the world they bought pixels on MDH at that crazy price?

I don't know what some people are doing, and I don't know how successful that milliondollarhomepage is, and you may even be successful among individuals who want to promote their blogs, but I think professional marketers will stick to professional advertising services.

[Lionel]

I don't know what some people are doing, and I don't know how successful that milliondollarhomepage is, and you may even be successful among individuals who want to promote their blogs, but I think professional marketers will stick to professional advertising services.

Ok i'm thinking about a money-back guarantee if the advertiser's banner does not get at least N clicks in a period of time.

How can i give evidence to him that he got the clicks?
Is there some hit counter service i can use? It should be an external service doing the monitoring, not my site otherwise the advertiser thinks i may cheat.

[Lionel]

The site now has a faucet! http://www.stealthepixels.com/get-free-money

It is a section of the site where people can get money for free, they only need to enter their wallet and solve a captcha to get a prize in BTC/LTC/USD.
The point of it is to gain traffic.

I'd like you to give me some comments/feedback on it, thank you

[questionableideas]

This is super interesting, but what's to stop someone from taking all of the extra space?

Also, the main page and purchase page seem to lag. It's probably due to the immense amount of pixel links there are?

[Lionel]

This is super interesting, but what's to stop someone from taking all of the extra space?

Also, the main page and purchase page seem to lag. It's probably due to the immense amount of pixel links there are?

Yes that's the reason for the lag.

Nobody stops you from taking all the free pixels
After then, all the free pixels would be exhausted and people would have to pay at least 0.01$ to "steal" them.

[sprinkle]

I'm curious how you're hosting this -- incredibly slow for me.

[Lionel]

I'm curious how you're hosting this -- incredibly slow for me.

Are you using internet explorer?
It actually is slow on IE

[Lionel]

We have added 2 features:

- the ability to add to cart a range of pixels at once. Hold SHIFT then click on the upper left corner of the rectangle, then click on the right bottom

- a button to empty your cart

[bittyweb]

I'm curious how you're hosting this -- incredibly slow for me.

Test the website using different servers with online tests.

Which browser are you using?

[Lionel]

I'm curious how you're hosting this -- incredibly slow for me.

Excuse me i was wrong, it is slow on Chrome only.
what browser were you using?

It works fine with Firefox, Safari and IE,
so i think it actually is a performance issue with Chrome.

i've just reported it to Google.

[Lionel]

Update: now we have the Statistics page http://stealthepixels.com/history/
which shows the daily clicks on the ads.

We've also optimized the homepage to load fast on all browsers, even Chrome

[jeppe]

This is an awesome idea!! so where would this ad be only on that site Or anywhere else ??

[Lionel]

This is an awesome idea!! so where would this ad be only on that site Or anywhere else ??

Yes only there, where else do you suggest to put it?

If you want to make an estimate on how many clicks you'll get if you purchase an ad,
look at the Statistics page once in a while: http://stealthepixels.com/history/

Usually the more blocks you get, the more clicks you'll get