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.