Improvement: simplified creation of advertising campaign

We have developed a new interface that makes it trivial to create a simple advertising campaign.

1. Click "Create Ad" button on our main page https://a-ads.com
   
2. Fill the form, set daily budget and click "Create Campaign"
   
3. Voilà, your campaign has been created!
   
   Now you can save your access data, set refund address and subscribe to campaign events notifications.
   Advanced parameters are available on the created campaign's page.

New feature: publishers can ban advertisers

We've implemented a simple feature to give publishers more control over ads that are being displayed on their ad units.

Publishers that specified withdrawal address upon ad unit creation can sign in and ban ads they dislike.

Banned campaigns will stop spending money on ad units that banned them and thus their share of traffic will gradually decrease down to 0 (it may take about an hour).

Why am I not paid for clicks? What is unique impressions? How do I earn more?

I have generated so many clicks, why am I not paid for them?

We are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network. We just allocate advertiser's money on publishers' ad units with respect to their unique impressions.

Advertisers get a share of impressions from ad unit in proportion to amount of money spent on it (see how it works on ad unit's campaign page, e. g.: https://a-ads.com/ad_units/1/campaigns).

What is unique impression?

Unique impression is an impression generated from IP address that is unique in the scope of the whole advertising network during a day.

If a site visitor saw any a-ads banner anywhere today, s/he can't generate a unique impression till tomorrow. If there are several ad units on the same page, only one of them can receive a unique impression (the one that loads first).

The average ratio of unique/non-unique impressions is about 1:50 currently, but it varies greatly from site to site. Most impressions are not unique but it is not important since all publishers are in equal position.

If your site generates unique impressions daily then you get a share of expenses of our advertisers and display their paid ads.

Otherwise we display affiliate ads for free and you get paid only when they attract customers to Anonymous Ads or its advertisers.

How do I earn more?

Put your ad unit on a visible place. If your ad unit has a reasonable CTR then it is likely to earn more. Moreover every ad unit has "Your ad here" link that may increase your income.

Every publisher that attracts paying advertisers receives half of the fees collected from them (see them in the ad unit's rewards tab, e. g.: https://a-ads.com/ad_units/1/goals).

You can put many ads on the same page if you want, but as explained above, it won't automatically increase your income.

However it might increase your income if you attract paying customers to Anonymous Ads or its advertisers.

New features: campaign/ad unit removal; more accurate number of active campaigns

Users that use Bitcoin address to sign in can remove their objects now (this feature is meant for convenience, we don't actually remove the data from our database yet, nor we consider it to be secret).

Also we modified the algorithm that calculates amount of active campaigns. Since yesterday we don't count campaigns that didn't spend a satoshi during last 24 hours even if their balance is positive. Thus the number of active campaigns is lower and more accurate now:

Free Advertising Opportunity

If your site was never advertised at Anonymous Ads and you want to get 1 day of free advertising, please accurately follow the following instructions:

1. Create an advertising campaign with "All traffic" and daily budget of 0.01 btc/day
2. Subscribe to campaign's notifications and deposit 0.01 btc to it
3. When your campaign runs out of funds, post your campaign ID here and we will deposit 0.01 btc to your campaign (you can set daily budget to 0 and withdraw the funds if you like)

We can support up to 20 advertisers per day this way (on the first come - first serve basis). If you try to advertise scam or some shady business, you won't receive a rebate. Please check this post right before depositing money to make sure that this offer is still valid.

Thanks!

Events and Notifications

We have developed new features that enable advertisers to be notified when something happens to their campaigns.
Subscribe to the RSS feed and get notifications without exposing your email to anybody!

You can also see the last event in the "Info" tab of your campaign.

Or see all the events in the "Events" tab.

We are hesitant about storing email addresses in our database because we don't we don't want to keep others' secrets. But we can enable advertisers to specify an optional public email addresses for their campaigns. Do you think this feature would be useful?

Why is Anonymous Ads good for advertisers?

No registration

You don't need to spend your time entering useless data about yourself, and we can't leak it or spam you. Just find or create an ad, start a campaign and deposit money (bitcoin only).

Cheap traffic

Yes, we have lots of cheap traffic. Often bitcoin-related traffic. Sometimes insanely cheap traffic. And yet it generates sales.

Wide coverage

We have thousands of sites and serve ads to ~1M globally unique IPs daily. You may receive more traffic than we show on your campaign's stats page since we show only globally unique IPs there.

Predictable expenses

Set your daily budget, we'll distribute them among ad units with respect to their traffic and your targeting.
Your expenses depend on you, amount of traffic you receive depends on market situation.

Don't pay for fake clicks

We are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network. Publishers don't have financial incentive to fake clicks and you don't pay for them.

Transparency

You can see our global stats, stats of other advertisers, stats of ad units. We have nothing to hide.

Control

You have control over your advertising campaign. Advertise everywhere, or limit your campaign to particular categories, sites, ad units. Track and ban ad units you don't like.

Goal tracking and Affiliate marketing

You can track which campaign and ad unit brought a visitor to you. You can reward efficient ad units for buyers they attracted (thus increasing your share of their impressions). If you do so, you will be listed here thus creating additional incentive for publishers to show your ads and share your links.

Warning

Please don't advertise scams, or you may loose your money.

How to get cheap traffic with Anonymous Ads?

Currently our average CPM is quite low, it is ~0.0002 btc (~0.12 usd) per 1000 of unique IPs. So you are quite likely to receive a lot of cheap traffic unless you restrict yourself to a subset of overpriced ad units or set an inadequately high daily budget.

If you want to run a massive advertising campaign and get as much traffic as possible for cheap, here is a simple scenario for you:

1. Add "All traffic" to your campaign

2. Set Quality range to [0..1]

3. Set daily budget to 0.015 btc/day (~10 usd/day), deposit 0.15 btc (for 10 days)

4. Get cheap traffic! And remember to come back in 10 days since we have no means to notify you about depleted balance.

In this scenario you get a share of traffic of every publisher of Anonymous Ads. Perhaps you'll receive a lot of bot traffic, but it doesn't mean you won't receive real visitors too. Make sure your site handles the load (if it doesn't - reduce the daily budget).

Please see the stats of one of our advertisers that follows this strategy:

Just couple days ago this advertiser received 15M impressions from over 250K IPs and 7K clicks from 3K IPs per day for only ~10 usd! Numbers fluctuate, but the average CPM is still several times (or orders of magnitude) lower than in other advertising networks.

But you can get even cheaper traffic if you want.

Currently ~20% of our traffic is non-English (Chinese, Spanish, Russian, etc), but we almost don't have non-English advertisers. Hence advertising campaigns in those languages may generate even cheaper, almost free traffic.

Warning regarding traffic price

Please note that Anonymous Ads doesn't guarantee any specific CPM. You may expect a certain value, but it may fluctuate significantly, it may even became insanely high. More bitcoins advertisers spend - higher the CPM. More traffic publishers generate - lower the CPM. Traffic price depends on targeting and market conditions.

Warning regarding ad moderation policy

Please abstain from advertising scam sites, or you may loose your money.

Fees restored to normal

Fees reduced for 1 week

We had a technical problem that prevented our advertisers' money from being spent on advertising and thus reduced our publishers' income during 12th-13th of July.

We decided to compensate the drop in publishers' earnings by reducing our fees for 7 days.

Normally we take 20% of advertisers' budgets as fees, that is equivalent to 25% of publishers' income. Today we temporary reduced it to 2.5% of publishers' income, thus our publishers should earn 22.5% more and get compensated by the end of 22th of July.

Brief overview of the latest improvements

We have released the following improvements:

1. Results of a site-wide search can be filtered by object type.
   
2. Convenient search of existing ads upon campaign creation.
   
3. Advertisers can change ads of existing campaigns.
   
4. Advertisers can edit their targeting and filter ad units by quality (see Quality range parameter).
   
5. Our moderators classify publishers' sites by category and quality (normally within 24 hours of ad unit creation). 

What is Ad Unit?

In Google AdSense ad unit is a set of ads displayed as a result of one piece of the AdSense ad code.

In Microsoft Bing it is the space in an application where ads are displayed.

In Anonymous Ads it is pretty much the same: an advertising space, a source of traffic, that has its own ID and parameters associated with it.

Ad Units are the key elements of our advertising network. Since we don't collect much information about visitors, our targeting is mainly based on ad units. Advertisers select ad units for their advertising campaigns either manually or by choosing the desired sites and categories.

Publishers specify what kinds of ads should not be displayed on their ad units (e. g. they can forbid NSFW or gambling ads, or disallow graphical banners).

If ad unit matches campaigns then it will get money from them and display their ads.

There are 2 types of ad units in Anonymous Ads: ad units of type "Site" and ad units of type "Anonymous".

Sites

Ad units of type "Site" have Site URL parameter that specifies the publisher's page with our code embedded (it may be embedded into many pages, but we need to know at least one exact URL to check if it is there).

Our bot visits publisher's page time to time and estimates the probability that our code is there. This estimated probability is denoted as "Health". It may take several days before the estimation becomes accurate.

We may also visit the site manually and set appropriate categories for it if we like it.

Anonymous

We don't know much about ad units of type "Anonymous". They can be embedded anywhere (browser extensions, mobile applications, sites, etc) and they have a description that is supposed to give a hint about origin of traffic. But usually we can't check whether description is correct or not, so anonymous ad units tend to stay in the "Unknown" category forever unless we see a convincing evidence that it should belong to some other category.

CPM for the "Unknown" category is usually much lower than for any other category.

Fixed issues with creation of advertising campaigns

Today we discovered that due to technical issues some advertisers might not be able to upload banners and create advertising campaigns. We have investigated and fixed these issues, everything should work now.

New feature: Advertisers can edit targeting of existing campaigns

We have developed couple new features to improve the experience of our advertisers.

1. Advertisers can edit targeting of their existing campaigns, i. e. add/remove categories, sites or individual ad units

2. Advertiser can see unclassified ad units and either add them in order to receive cheap relevant traffic, or ban them in order to prevent them from being added to campaign.

3. Advertiser can choose the reason for adding/banning ad units. We plan to use this information to better classify ad units in the catalog.

Heartbleed vulnerability: no personal data leaked

We have updated our server software to fix the Heartbleed vulnerability. We can assure you that no personal data leaked from our servers (since we do not collect any personal data).

Catalogue reorganization

Since our unmoderated catalogue became almost unusable, we decided to reorganize it.

Publishers won't be able to select categories for their ad units any more.

Most of the existing ad units will be moved to category "Unknown". New ad units will appear in this category automatically.

We will manually assign other categories to ad units we like. And we will try to optimize the tree of categories.

Catalogue reorganization will be ongoing process. It should improve advertisers' experience as well as income of our best publishers.

Graphical banners for our referral program

We added several graphical banners to our referral program, please see them here.

New feature: advertisers can set maximum desired CPM

Now advertisers can set the maximum desired CPM for their existing campaigns.

CPM stands for "cost per mille" or cost per thousand of views, in Anonymous Ads it denotes amount of bitcoins you pay to receive ad impressions from thousand of globally unique IP addresses.

Since we are not pay-per-click or pay-per-impression network, there is no guarantee that actual CPM will be below this value, but in most cases it should.

New feature: sign in with your Bitcoin address

Public key cryptography used in Bitcoin enables anybody to sign in to Anonymous Ads without registration.

Just enter your bitcoin address, use it to sign our message, paste the signature and click "Sign In" button.

Signed in users can see the list of their campaigns and ad units and edit some of their properties.

E. g. publishers can edit withdrawal parameters of their ad units.

We accept Bitcoin-QT - compatible signatures (supported by MultiBit, Electrum,  Blockchain.info and probably other wallets as well).

Instructions for popular Bitcoin wallets

Blockchain.info

1. Go to Receive Money section of your wallet
2. Find your bitcoin address and click Actions -> Sign message
3. Sign the message displayed in a-ads sign in form
4. Copy and paste the signature to the form

Bitcoin-QT

1. Click Receive Coins
2. Right-click your bitcoin address, select Sign Message
3. Sign the message displayed at a-ads sign in form
4. Copy and paste the signature to the form

Electrum

1. Open Receive tab
2. Right-click your bitcoin address, select Sign Message
3. Sign the message displayed at a-ads sign in form
4. Copy and paste the signature to the form

MultiBit

1. Select Tools -> Sign Message from the top menu
2. Specify your bitcoin address, sign the message displayed at a-ads sign in form
3. Copy and paste the signature to the form

Other

If you have access to private key of your bitcoin address, you can use http://brainwallet.org/#sign to sign our message as in the example below:

List of campaigns that reward for goals

We implemented several new features:

1. List of campaigns that reward for goals

If campaign has goal tracking enabled, it will appear in the list of affiliate programs. Each time advertiser rewards publishers via our API, his or her campaign goes to the top of the list.

Publishers can use this list to find out the most paying advertisers and to refer buyers to them via affiliate links.

2. List of active campaigns

Everybody can see the list of active campaigns sorted by daily budget.

3. Moderation of funded campaigns

Since most of the created ads are never paid, we decided to moderate only ads that have a funded campaign. So please deposit any amount to your advertising campaign if you want your ad to be approved.

Warning for scammers: if we suspect you in malicious advertising attempt, we may decide to ban your ad without refund.