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Automatic withdrawals occur only when the amount to be withdrawn is higher than the withdrawal threshold defined in the settings page.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

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.

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).

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).

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:

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?

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). 

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.

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.

Advertisers can select countries for their campaigns

We developed a new feature that enables advertisers to restrict their campaigns to certain countries. If the list of allowed countries is empty then all the countries are allowed (unless they are listed as disallowed).

However it doesn't yet affect how advertiser's moneys are being spent on ad units. It just replaces advertiser's ad with default ad if visitor's IP belongs to disallowed country.