A change in our policy: the number of ad units per page limit or how many ad units are allowed

After a careful consideration we are announcing a slight alteration of our policy which we believe will affect only a fraction of our publishers.

Starting from October 2016 we now only guarantee that only up to three ad units per page will be served to the visitors of your website and here's why.

Unlike other advertising networks, A-Ads doesn't pay merely for impressions or for clicks: we consider globally unique impressions within our entire network. It becomes obvious then that having more than several ad units per page doesn't make a lot of sense from the financial point of view: additional ad units might not necessarily bring your additional earnings.

Secondly, we've had a number of publishers who placed literally dozens of dozens of ad units per page in a hope that extra ad units would proportionally increase their earnings and of course that hadn't helped their cause. Consequently our servers bore a very substantial computational burden and it jeopardized our operations.

Downtime and compensations to the advertisers

Yesterday at 7:54 UTC during deployment of the newer version of our software we encountered an unexpected problem that made our site unavailable. It took about 3 hours to figure out the reason and resolve the issue. It didn't affect publishers' income, but unfortunately part of that time the graphic versions of ads could not be served properly.

We decided to compensate the downtime to all the advertisers. Here is the list of campaign IDs and the respective amounts (in satoshi):

[[1, 62500], [3782, 1250000], [4888, 12500], [5305, 625], [5334, 625000], [7358, 125], [9712, 12500], [9713, 3749.875], [9714, 3749.875], [9715, 3749.875], [9716, 3749.875], [9717, 3749.875], [9718, 3749.875], [9719, 3749.875], [9720, 3749.875], [9721, 3749.875], [9722, 3749.875], [9723, 3749.875], [9725, 3749.875], [9726, 3749.875], [9727, 3749.875], [11013, 125], [11736, 1250], [12323, 1250], [13145, 2125], [13159, 1250], [13161, 1250], [13164, 1250], [13324, 1250], [13355, 12500], [13547, 112499.75], [13614, 62500], [13669, 250], [13751, 1250], [13853, 375], [14929, 37500], [15092, 37500], [15128, 37500], [15236, 37500], [15397, 37500], [16095, 12500], [16214, 62500], [16307, 375], [16936, 37500], [17012, 12500], [17686, 500], [18051, 37500], [18594, 62500], [19722, 625], [19849, 37500], [20102, 0], [20207, 1937.5], [20218, 2500], [20594, 1250], [20634, 125000], [20638, 125000], [20639, 125000], [20696, 3749.875], [20715, 250000], [21095, 187500], [21105, 6250], [21282, 3749.875], [21338, 37500], [21402, 1250], [21496, 1250000], [21556, 37500], [21576, 250000], [21595, 4375], [21627, 37500], [21780, 12500], [21811, 43750], [21965, 3749.75], [21997, 1525], [22021, 37500], [22159, 37500], [22206, 7499.625], [22396, 25000], [22474, 125000], [22560, 37500], [22666, 375], [22699, 2500], [22744, 25000], [22755, 125000], [22756, 125000], [22790, 250], [22819, 125000], [22885, 12500], [22887, 12500], [22998, 43750], [22999, 125000], [23006, 125], [23036, 25000], [23116, 1250], [23117, 37500], [23129, 37500], [23136, 25000], [23201, 625], [23308, 375], [23367, 125000], [23378, 1250], [23407, 375], [23461, 12500], [23466, 25000], [23563, 25000], [23570, 62500], [23571, 37500], [23616, 5000], [23674, 100000], [23755, 12500], [23758, 12500], [23797, 12500], [23805, 1250], [23811, 12500], [23834, 37500], [23838, 8750], [23843, 5000], [23846, 5000], [23856, 37500], [23858, 1250], [23864, 12500], [23867, 12500], [23879, 62500], [23885, 62500], [23886, 62500], [23899, 6250], [23905, 125000], [23910, 125000], [23911, 12500], [23927, 187500], [23936, 0], [23947, 62500], [23949, 0], [23954, 125000], [23960, 62500], [23961, 75000], [23971, 12500], [23973, 12500], [23974, 62500], [23977, 31250], [23981, 262500], [23985, 1250], [23993, 50000], [23999, 12500], [24006, 25000], [24007, 125000], [24009, 12500], [24010, 12500], [24020, 12500], [24022, 12500], [24023, 125000], [24026, 12500], [24027, 1250], [24029, 12500], [24030, 12500], [24033, 25000], [24034, 875000], [24037, 12500]]

The funds have been returned to the campaigns' balances. 

We also returned the funds that we had promised to return in June (sorry for the delay), so some of the 0-balance campaigns with positive daily budgets were resumed.

We are having technical issues [RESOLVED]

Sorry, we are having a technical issue that affects the availability of our web site and of the graphic banners. We are working to resolve it.

Update 22:10 UTC: The issue probably appeared about 5 hours ago. We expect to fix it in 1-2 hours. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Despite the mentioned problems, publishers' ad units are continuing to earn and advertising campaigns are continuing to spend. Publishers' income is not affected.

Since the issue is related to the graphic banners, advertisers that have them will be compensated for the missing impressions.

Update 23:19 UTC: The issue has been resolved. The  main site should be available and the graphic ads should be served properly.

The estimated downtime was about 6 hours. Here is the preliminary list of the  advertising campaigns than were affected by the issue (in the form of the JSON array of pairs <campaign id, estimated loss in satoshis>):

[[1, 83333], [5334, 833333], [5516, 16666], [7550, 33333], [9712, 16666], [9713, 4999], [9714, 4999], [9715, 4999], [9716, 4999], [9717, 4999], [9718, 4999], [9719, 4999], [9720, 4999], [9721, 4999], [9722, 4999], [9723, 4999], [9725, 4999], [9726, 4999], [11719, 25000], [11720, 4999], [11721, 4999], [11723, 4999], [11724, 4999], [11725, 4999], [11726, 4999], [11727, 4999], [11729, 4999], [11730, 4999], [11732, 4999], [11733, 4999], [11735, 4999], [11738, 4999], [11739, 4999], [11740, 4999], [12827, 5500], [13547, 149999], [15092, 50000], [16095, 16666], [17012, 16666], [17920, 16666], [18402, 25000], [18689, 25000], [18692, 4999], [18693, 4999], [18694, 4999], [18695, 4999], [18697, 4999], [18698, 4999], [18699, 4999], [18701, 4999], [18702, 4999], [18703, 4999], [18704, 25000], [18708, 165277], [19041, 283333], [20012, 166666], [20055, 500000], [20102, 33333], [20207, 50000], [20379, 16666], [20512, 8333], [20574, 8333], [20634, 333333], [20638, 1000000], [21022, 66666], [21095, 333333], [21105, 8333], [21148, 1666666], [21186, 16666], [21221, 33333], [21249, 33333], [21250, 33333], [21256, 16666], [21338, 50000], [21373, 33333], [21374, 16666], [21375, 33333], [21377, 33333], [21379, 33333], [21419, 50000], [21424, 16666], [21496, 2500000], [21519, 83333], [21523, 20833], [21561, 166666], [21563, 16666], [21588, 166666], [21597, 50000], [21600, 16666], [21623, 16666], [21627, 66666], [21642, 16666], [21648, 3333], [21650, 3333], [21651, 3333], [21652, 3333], [21662, 16666], [21664, 4999], [21666, 16666], [21682, 16666], [21714, 3333], [21715, 116666], [21716, 16666], [21739, 33333], [21740, 66666], [21757, 3333], [21763, 50000], [21766, 116666], [21769, 2499], [21770, 2499], [21776, 16666], [21777, 16666], [21779, 16666], [21785, 50000], [21787, 33333], [21790, 33333], [21791, 333333], [21792, 8333]]

The estimated advertisers' losses will be compensated in a day or two.

Withdrawals from user's campaigns go to user's account balance

A-ads users' balances are automatically used to top up the depleting balances of their active campaigns (the ones with positive daily budget and activated ads).

In order to pause or stop the campaign, the advertiser has to set its daily budget to 0. It may leave a tiny unsused balance that is sometimes too small to get withdrawn via bitcoin transaction.

That is why we introduced a change: if advertiser requests a withdrawal from her campaign, the campaigns' balance will be returned to her user account (instead of bitcoin address). So even a single satoshi left on the campaign's balance can be withdrawn (and the campaign can be safely deleted after that).

This change doesn't affect anonymous campaigns that are not linked to any particular user.

A-ads affiliate program: create affiliate link in less than 30 seconds

We share 50% of fees collected from advertisers with our affiliates that attracted them. We paid out over 44 btc in over 85 thousands of rewards (all are public and transparent).
 
Everybody can participate in our affiliate program, you don't even need to have a web site neither a user account to do it.

1. Click "Earn" in our top menu:

2. Select any ad unit type (if you don't plan to embed our ad unit anywhere, then select "affiliate"):

3. If you are in a hurry then just scroll down to withdraw parameters, click "Bitcoin address", paste your bitcoin address and click "Create ad unit":

That's it, notice your affiliate link!

Share your affiliate link with potential advertisers and get 50% of fees collected from ads that they create with it.

Note: for your own convenience it is recommended to sign up before creating your affiliate link (in that case on step 3 choose to withdraw to your user account).

Support system

We've integrated the Zendesk's support widget. It appears on the bottom-right of the browser window on every page.

Hopefully it will help us to improve the communication with our customers.

Results of the 1-week experiment: A-ADS is more cost-efficient for advertisers

We’ve conducted a one-week experiment: created identical advertising campaigns to promote our service at 3 major bitcoin advertising networks (including a-ads.com) with the daily budget of 0.01 btc per campaign. Here are the results:

	a-ads.com	Competitor 1	Competitor 2
Clicks reported by the ad network	309	469	655
Clicks reported  by goo.gl	472	532	663
Visitors clicked “Create ad” on our site	22 (4.7%)	11 (2.1%)	12 (1.8%)
Visitors converted into paying advertisers	0	0	0
Visitors converted into publishers	4 (0.8%)	3 (0.6%)	2 (0.3%)
Cost of attracting a publisher	0.018 btc	0.023 btc	0.035 btc
Ad units created by the attracted publishers	8	4	3

It looks like our advertising network is significantly more cost-efficient for advertisers than its competitors.

We got AADS ticker symbol at Havelock Investments

AADS units represent 40% of interest in Anonymous Ads and are tradable at Havelock Investments (https://www.havelockinvestments.com/order.php?symbol=AADS).