Returned 20% back to the campaigns' balances in order to compensate the downtime

Yesterday we had an issue with our SSL certificate that made our service unavailable for almost 4.75 hours (or ~20% of the day).

It didn't affect publishers' earnings, but it negatively affected the running advertising campaigns. So we sent 20% of yesterday's advertising spendings back to the campaigns' balances in order to compensate that.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for inconvenience.

New feature: dashboard for our users (publishers and advertisers)

We've deployed a new feature - user dashboard. It allows the user to control their ad units and campaigns in a single place.

Advertisers can see their campaigns and adjust their daily budgets without leaving the page. They can also deposit bitcoins to their user accounts (no need to fund individual campaigns any more).

Users' funds are being used to automatically top up their campaigns with respect to their daily budgets (daily budgets for old inactive campaigns have been set to zero).

Since we don't want to hold large amounts of users' money indefinitely, we withdraw them automatically according to the following rule:

IF
    there were no deposits during the last 30 days AND 
    there were no withdrawals during the last 24 hours AND
    user's balance is higher than the expected monthly expenses
THEN 
    withdraw the difference between the user's balance and the expected monthly expenses.

Automatic withdrawals occur only when the amount to be withdrawn is higher than the withdrawal threshold defined in the settings page.

Users can also withdraw all funds by clicking the button "Withdraw all funds". The minimum withdrawal amount is 0.0001 btc.

Long waited features: optional user accounts, pooled withdrawals, max captcha rate

Optional user accounts

Since 2011 we were resistant to add user accounts to Anonymous Ads because it is somehow against the user-agnostic nature of our service. However for the sake of convenience we decided to gradually rebuild our system.

Few days ago we deployed a change that enables our users to get registered at Anonymous Ads.
 

It is optional: publishers and advertisers can still use our service without registration. But if they want - they can get registered and sign in with login and password now.
For users that signed in via Bitcoin signatures in the past we automatically created user accounts and linked them to ad units and campaigns with corresponding bitcoin address.


We don't require email address upon registration, but if you choose to specify it - please use the one that you don't mind to publish, we don't want to hold others' secrets. Also please note that your email address can be used to recover access to your account.

Pooled withdrawals

Before we introduced user accounts, ad units were autonomous: they had separate balances and withdrawal from a certain ad unit could happen only after its balance hits the withdrawal threshold (of 0.0001 btc by default).

Thus if a publisher had 2 ad units, each with 0.00009 btc (0.00018 btc in total), there was no easy way to withdraw this money.

Nothing changed in this regard unless a publisher creates ad units from his/her user account.

Earnings of ad units that are linked to some user account, get accumulated on that user's balance and then withdrawn automatically when it hits the user's withdrawal threshold.

Thus publishers withdrawals can happen more often (and their wallets - less fragmented).

Max captcha rate

By introducing the captchas about a month ago we filtered out ~90% of our clicks as non-human.

Captchas are being displayed upon ad click with a probability that depends on ad unit's performance (for ad units that generate fake clicks captchas are being displayed more often).

But some publishers didn't like this solution, so we decided to make it optional for them and let the market decide whether captchas are required at all.

Publishers can set the Max captcha rate of their ad units, e. g. they can specify that no more than X% of clicks should be verified with Captcha.

Advertisers can specify that they want at least Y% of clicks to be verified by captchas.

If X < Y then ad unit doesn't fit the targeting criteria of the advertiser.

So publishers are interested to set X to 100% in order to get more advertising budgets and advertisers are interested to set Y to 0% in order to get a higher conversion for their money.

New feature: Captcha rate for advertisers

Since we are not pay-per-click advertising network, fake clicks don't affect advertisers' expenses. But they distort advertisers' statistics, that is why we implemented a new feature that enables our advertisers to filter out bot generated clicks via captcha.

Advertisers can specify the Captcha rate for their campaigns:

The default value is 0, but if you want to check all the visitors before they arrive to your site, you can set it to 100%.

Although some people might refuse to pass the captcha, we don't expect significant decrease of conversion since this kind of captcha is usually easy to pass. Here is how it looks like:

We expect a significant decrease of unique clicks registered by our servers because they will be filtered out by captchas.

New feature: Wanted Daily Income (was Min Daily Income)

Update 2015-09-17: in order to prevent confusion, we renamed Min daily income to Wanted daily income, everything else in this article should be valid.

Publishers

We developed a feature that enables publishers to indirectly set the minimum price of their traffic by specifying the Min daily income parameter.

It doesn't automatically increase publishers' earnings but it increases their chances to earn affiliate rewards. If ad unit's earnings are lower than Min daily income then a share of its impressions will be used to display free affiliate ads:

affiliate share = Max(0, 1 - average income / min daily income)

Advertisers compete for free affiliate impressions by rewarding the sources of converting traffic.

If Min daily income is too high then most of the traffic will go to affiliate programs while the remaining traffic will become too expensive for advertisers.

If Min daily income is too low then the price of the traffic will be determined solely by market forces, no affiliate ads will be shown for free.

The default value is 0.00001000 Ƀ, so for new ad units 100% of impressions go to affiliate programs until they get paying advertisers.

Advertisers

Advertisers can set Max CPM parameter to exclude ad units with expensive traffic from their campaigns.

Please keep in mind that:

• CPM is volatile and counted based on the globally-unique impressions;
• average CPM is expected to be much lower than Max CPM;
• your daily budget will not be fully spent if there is no enough traffic that satisfies your criteria.

If you don't want to worry about price and quality of traffic then find out how you can get free traffic and pay only after it converts.

Receive free traffic, pay after it converts

In order to better monetize our publishers' traffic we are willing to deliver some of it for free! What we need in return is your commitment to track and reward publishers that bring customers to you.

If you want to receive free traffic, please follow these instructions:

1. Create an advertising campaign with a daily budget of 0
2. In campaign's settings enable Goal tracking and customize URL Suffix as you need.
   

New feature: revenue sharing model

Anonymous Ads uses amount of globally unique impressions as a major metric to determine publisher's share of advertising budgets.

If ad unit doesn't generate globally unique traffic, its share is 0 and it displays only our default "Your ad here" ad (that is useless in this case anyway).

We decided to change this behaviour and to display ads for affiliate programs instead. They are still displayed for free but at least there is a chance that they earn affiliate rewards.

Thus advertisers can get traffic for free and pay for real customers only.

If you are an advertiser who is interested in such a model - please drop an email to support@a-ads.com.

Language detection algorithm changed

According to current stats ~80% of visitors are English speaking, but only ~20% of them originate from English speaking countries.

We decided to increase the accuracy of our language detection mechanism. New algorithm ignores Accept-Language setting if it not consistent with geoip data.

The stats accuracy is expected to gradually improve over the next 7 days.

Search of ad units in catalog, automatic ban of phishing/malware ads, improved geo-filters and IP counters

1. Advertisers can search ad units in the catalogue (and in their campaigns' targeting tab as well).  
2. Google Safe Browsing Lookup API is used to automatically ban malicious ads.
3. Our geo-filtering mechanism is still extravagant but at least it prevents advertising budgets from being spent on ad units that have less than 30% of traffic from the wanted countries now.
4. Unique IPs expire in 24 hours from their occurrence (not at midnight as it was before).