Anonymous Ads - bitcoin advertising network [migration to v.2]

[arsenische]

oh that, I was trying to get regular ads to show up, but I guess the no images rule broke that, was trying to find a way around it, but gave up, I'm not as familiar with html as I'd like to be.

unfortunately bitcoin forum doesn't allow images in signatures anymore.. and AA doesn't connect ads to affiliates that don't display ads.. so if you want your link to point to the list of ads, you'll need to invest (or fake) some impressions to get connected...

[Satori]

Advertisers are supposed do the following 2 steps:
1) pay any amount to Anonymous Ads to bootstrap their ads (to get some impressions and to get connected to affiliates).
2) track bitcoin addresses passed as GET parameter and use those addresses to reward affiliates for successful visits (thus getting more impressions & visits from them)

Main source of income for affiliates should be step 2. But for some reason it doesn't work: most advertisers don't do step 2.

So I need to spend money received at step 1 to support affiliates for showing ads.

However (unlike advertisers) I can't detect successful visits to reward affiliates. And I don't want to pay botnets for fake clicks and impressions.

Is there some reason the links in ads can't clickthrough to your site, which would then redirect the user to the advertisers'?

Seems like you could track visits to your own pages rather easily.

[arsenische]

Advertisers are supposed do the following 2 steps:
1) pay any amount to Anonymous Ads to bootstrap their ads (to get some impressions and to get connected to affiliates).
2) track bitcoin addresses passed as GET parameter and use those addresses to reward affiliates for successful visits (thus getting more impressions & visits from them)

Main source of income for affiliates should be step 2. But for some reason it doesn't work: most advertisers don't do step 2.

So I need to spend money received at step 1 to support affiliates for showing ads.

However (unlike advertisers) I can't detect successful visits to reward affiliates. And I don't want to pay botnets for fake clicks and impressions.

Is there some reason the links in ads can't clickthrough to your site, which would then redirect the user to the advertisers'?

Seems like you could track visits to your own pages rather easily.

I do track the visits. The list of tracked bitcoin addresses with amount of unique clicks during the last <billing cycle> days is available in csv format, the link is on the Ad's stats page (e.g. http://anonymousads.com/ad/1/stats).

But I can't distinguish successful visits from the ones generated by scripts or botnets. Advertisers should pay only for clicks that help them to reach their business goals. Only they know what successful visit is.

I plan to add a new feature to simplify their job. Here is a brief description:

1. advertiser accesses AA via https, enters the captcha
2. AA generates unique PHP code for advertiser
3. advertiser embeds this code into his/her goal page
4. when visitor opens the goal page, this code will sign & send info about successful visit to anonymous ads
5. advertiser can access report of successful visits and reward affiliates for them

Later support for other (non-PHP) server platforms can be added.

[Satori]

Oh, you seem to have got it then.  Are you using a CMS yourself?  If so, there may be a script for that.  If there isn't one, once you have one coded you may be able to sell it as a digital good and recoup your investment for the coding.

If you don't have the funds for coding the script, I suggest GLBSE.  They just went into Beta about a week ago.

[arsenische]

Oh, you seem to have got it then.  Are you using a CMS yourself?  If so, there may be a script for that.  If there isn't one, once you have one coded you may be able to sell it as a digital good and recoup your investment for the coding.

If you don't have the funds for coding the script, I suggest GLBSE.  They just went into Beta about a week ago.

No, I am not using CMS. Hmm... CMS plugin that would allow to track bitcoin addresses is an interesting idea! I do have some free php example here, but maybe wordpress/joomla/drupal plugin would be a better option.

Regarding GLBSE, I issued AA asset few days ago... Didn't advertise it though because I am not sure how many I want to sell and what price should be.

[arsenische]

I plan to add a new feature to simplify their job. Here is a brief description:

1. advertiser accesses AA via https, enters the captcha
2. AA generates unique PHP code for advertiser
3. advertiser embeds this code into his/her goal page
4. when visitor opens the goal page, this code will sign & send info about successful visit to anonymous ads
5. advertiser can access report of successful visits and reward affiliates for them

Later support for other (non-PHP) server platforms can be added.

The feature added in some simplified manner: AA doesn't generate unique PHP code for advertiser (it generates only RSA keypair). But there is an explanation and simple PHP example. I also added some explanations for affiliates and for advertisers.

If you decide to embed goal tracking into your PHP site - please let me know, I can help you.

If you port it to some other language or make CMS module and don't mind publishing it - please let me know too

So, now theoretically advertisers have an easier way to track visitors' actions and reward affiliates. I hope it works on practice.

[Bro]

do websites that accept porn adds make more money? you have some stats maybe?

[arsenische]

Updated original post just to make it nicer and to remove old stuff.

do websites that accept porn adds make more money? you have some stats maybe?

I think they do. Higher the filtration level -- lower the competition between advertisers (because less advertisers qualify the filtration criteria). On the other hand some advertisers could reward particular safe sites to get more impressions from them. All the stats are in the database that is published daily. I don't have convenient tool to visualize them yet.

[Matoking]

Dangit, I forgot to add my site to your list and I didn't remember to do it until now.

[arsenische]

@Matoking: sorry to hear that.. I hope you catch up quickly.. maybe this little promotion attracts more money

New promotion for advertisers

First 5 ads that successfully set up and use AA's goal tracking feature to reward affiliates will receive 1 btc to their deposit addresses.

[MaxSan]

After setting up your advertsing on a blog I think this is spot on. Glad to hear your listed on Glbse also. Im in.

[arsenische]

After setting up your advertsing on a blog I think this is spot on. Glad to hear your listed on Glbse also. Im in.

Thanks )

New promotion for advertisers

First 5 ads that successfully set up and use AA's goal tracking feature to reward affiliates will receive 1 btc to their deposit addresses.

1 advertiser installed goal tracking (http://anonymousads.com/goal/6) and received 1 btc to bootstrap his ad.

4 btc left.

[arsenische]

Hi, friends!

I can see that several competitors of Anonymous Ads appeared within last few days. They all are quite decent and promising services and I wish them good luck.

But I don't want to loose the competition, so I need to accelerate development of Anonymous Ads. Many things need to be done: create unique design, develop many new features, improve usability, scalability and reliability. I hope to do it during a month or two. I believe that when it is "ready", it should magically become very popular (if not - then some marketing needs to be done too).

So now I am trying to raise 1000 btc via selling 10% share of future profits at GLBSE.

It is only ~5000 USD (that is an average monthly salary of american software developer) for 10% of future profits (that could be.. well.. i don't really want to compare it with AdSense...).

There are 100000 AA shares issued at GLBSE. I currently own ~99930 shares, and ~70 has been sold to random people at random prices. I just created a sell order for 10000 shares (that is 10% of all the issued shares) at 0.1 btc/share.

So you if you want to help AA - buy some shares. It could be a nice investment opportunity. I promise to be very careful & responsible with your investments

[SgtSpike]

Hi, friends!

I can see that several competitors of Anonymous Ads appeared within last few days. They all are quite decent and promising services and I wish them good luck.

But I don't want to loose the competition, so I need to accelerate development of Anonymous Ads. Many things need to be done: create unique design, develop many new features, improve usability, scalability and reliability. I hope to do it during a month or two. I believe that when it is "ready", it should magically become very popular (if not - then some marketing needs to be done too).

So now I am trying to raise 1000 btc via selling 10% share of future profits at GLBSE.

It is only ~5000 USD (that is an average monthly salary of american software developer) for 10% of future profits (that could be.. well.. i don't really want to compare it with AdSense...).

There are 100000 AA shares issued at GLBSE. I currently own ~99930 shares, and ~70 has been sold to random people at random prices. I just created a sell order for 10000 shares (that is 10% of all the issued shares) at 0.1 btc/share.

So you if you want to help AA - buy some shares. It could be a nice investment opportunity. I promise to be very careful & responsible with your investments

You're valuing your startup advertising service at $50,000?

What is your current monthly profit?  How much growth do you see in the future?  What is the total market for Bitcoin advertising?

[arsenische]

You're valuing your startup advertising service at $50,000?

What is your current monthly profit?  How much growth do you see in the future?  What is the total market for Bitcoin advertising?

Good questions.

I haven't created any accounting and financial reports. But the system if transparent, everybody can see that advertisers paid almost 160 btc in total (124 btc to bootstrap ads + 33 btc paid to affiliates). Currently at least 40% of bootstrap money is profit, so total profit can be estimated as 64 btc. Though the main advertiser is me with ad #1 (56 btc deposited) and I have spent something on hosting, domain name, advertising with other services, etc, and I spend my time supporting it.. So I wouldn't say it has any monthly profit.

But I can say that it shows ads to about 25-30 thousand unique IPs according to site stats and about 260 thousands daily hits according to apache logs analyzed by webalizer. And this number gradually grows. I hope that the growth will become exponential when I solve usability and scalability issues.

[arsenische]

Created Anonymous Ads group at coinconnect.org. You are welcome to use it for discussions too

[arsenische]

New feature: simple search mechanism. Now you can find ad, affiliate, site, relay (reward address) or goal by substring of some of their attributes. And also for each reward address you can see the linked Ad and Affiliate.

[arsenische]

New feature: advertisers can now get connected to affiliates they choose and to get a lot of impressions for insanely low prices (though it may change quickly).

To do so, just find the desired Affiliate and enter Ad# to create (or find) a relay that connects that Ad to that Affiliate.

You can use search to find affiliates related to sites.

For example, let's say you want to show ad #109 on some site which has "anon" in its url. You can do the following:

1) use search mechanism to find the desired site
2) navigate to affiliate that shows ads on that site, see estimation of advertising cost (~0.001 btc/day for 45% of impressions currently, but it can change anytime depending on advertisers' behaviour)
3) type in ad # and captcha, press "Get reward address" (you'll be redirected to the corresponding relay page)
4) see Ad's reward score for that Affiliate and the estimated percentage of impressions Ad receives from Affiliate
6) deposit any amount to Reward address to proportionally increase the reward score and that percentage

[arsenische]

New feature: Anonymous Ads sends user agent = "Anonymous Ads" to HTTP server when it checks the listed sites.

Site owners can use it to serve a special version of the web page in case if they can't show ads on the exact URL specified in the list (e.g. they allow NSFW ads but need to show a warning before showing them, or URL corresponds to a frameset or swf application).

Please don't misuse this feature: sites that don't show ads to people but serve it for AA bot can be penalized or (I don't like this word) banned.

[Tritonio]

Is it possible to add my Chrome extension to the list of sites? The ads appear on the little popup that appears when you click on the extension button but the popup doesn't have a URL to put into the "new site" page.

You can see the screenshots here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fblekdojabihjdhndhmloalbcnnejddl to see where the ad appears.

BTW I have limited the height of the ad so that image ads are not that intrusive but I believe this is no problem as the worst that can happen is that image ads are clicked less often and thus pay me less and thus appear less often.