Topic: [ANN] a-ads.com: Bitcoin advertising network. Advertise now! - page 37. (Read 174743 times)

Just a beginner question. i set up an account and created a banner campaign of size 120x600. Now i want to create another campaign with banner size 250x250 but i can not find a way to do it with my existing account. do i need to create another account for another banner size? :/

I queried the database to see what kind of statistics we got and found out that over ~1K ad units generate > 0 captcha requests per day (daily estimates are calculated as: today_fraction*today_value_of_metric+(1-today_fraction)*yesterday_value_of_metric).

An average ad unit in this set has:
  captcha display rate = 47%
  captcha pass rate = 46%

If we assume that all ad units generate only real traffic, then 47%*(100%-46%)= 25.4% of visitors who clicked the ad on the average ad unit were stopped by captcha. That is the most pessimistic expectation.  Actual stats should look much nicer since we display captchas more often to ad units that rarely pass them and also many ad units are probably generating only bot visits thus distorting the general picture.

I've split this set of ad units into 5 groups:
A) ~42% with captcha pass rate = 0%
B) ~10% with captcha pass rate in (0..50%) range
C) ~5% with captcha pass rate = 50%
D) ~12% with captcha pass rate in (50..100%) range
E) ~31% with captcha pass rate = 100%

I think ad units of the group D are the most interesting since most of their traffic is confirmed to be human and they have more than 2 captcha requests per day.

An average ad unit in this group has:
  captcha display rate = ~1%
  captcha pass rate = ~75%

If we assume that all ad units in group D generate only real traffic, then 1%*(100%-75%)=0.25% of visitors who clicked the ad were stopped by captchas. This is less significant than daily fluctuations of traffic and our CPM (that we aim to improve by improving the quality of traffic our advertisers receive).

Some more stats (just to make more sense of the data):

~49% of all ad units that have click attempts, have captcha display rate of ~1%

~84% of all ad units that have successful captcha passes, have captcha display rate of ~1%

Ad units with > 10 daily unique clicks and captcha pass rate > 30%, have average captcha pass rate of ~74% and average captcha display rate of ~2%.

It doesn't appear in an ad, it appears in new browser tab with some probability after you click it (the probability depenends on past captcha performance of this ad unit and on campaign settings). So the network-wide click stats you see now should be more adequate (there are ~5K, not ~1M of real clicks per day).

If significant amount of users refuse to pass the captcha, advertisers' conversions should drop. If there are any advertisers in this thread - please let us know whether that is the case. I received 1 complaint from an advertiser from Russia, who noticed the decreased amount of clicks. But I'd be thankful for feedback from other advertisers as well (preferably English-speaking).

If conversions suffer significantly then we'll need to roll-back the change. Otherwise I think we should allow publishers to specify max captcha rate for their ad units. Publishers will be able to set it to 0, but if campaign's captcha rate is higher than ad unit's, then ad unit won't earn from that campaign. It may take couple of days to develop, test and deploy it.

But using captchas in ads is unheard of, and with good reason, I would never do a captcha that appeared in an ad.
There must be other ways to determine that the traffic is real or not.

I think your proposal of allowing publishers to choose whether or not to allow this feature is a good solution. This at least gives control back to the publishers, allowing them to evaluate the two and see what works best for them. As long as this is a possibility, I have no issues with it.

How often do you think an average visitor clicks the ad? Do you think that clicking the checkbox is that annoying? Why do you think that it will have significant impact on your user loyalty?


That's true, our publishers are the key component of our business. We want to make them happy and we appreciate their loyalty despite the low revenue. We think that they deserve to earn more than they currently do.  Or do you think we are trying to solve non-existent problem? Publishers, are you happy with your current level of income from a-ads?

Publishers' earnings depend on amounts of money spent by advertisers. That's why we want to make our service look good for advertisers.

When advertisers realize that we have 50M impressions from 1M unique addresses and 2M clicks, many of them just leave because they understand that most of this traffic is fake and it doesn't worth it. Yes, they don't pay per click, but not all of them understand that. And they don't know how many real clicks they should expect to get when they set their advertising budgets. The numbers we showed so far (like hundreds of clicks for 0.01$ in btc) were too good to be true.

Also in our system fake traffic makes more damage to legit publishers than to advertisers because it reduces their share of the advertising budgets. So even if this feature doesn't increase advertising budgets, it would allow us to reduce the income of the fraudulent publishers and increase the earnings of the honest ones.

Why do you worry about captchas so much? We don't plan to display it every time user clicks an ad. Less than 1% of your visitors are likely to ever see it, and most of them will probably pass it by just clicking the checkbox. The negative effects are likely to be negligible in comparison with the possible gains.

Yes, that's somewhat similar to 90s except the no-captcha recaptcha is much more convenient and easy to solve.

An alternative solution would be to invade visitors' privacy with cookies and javascript. Perhaps we could change the money distribution principles and switch to some form of RTB network. I feel that it would be damaging to the original idea of user-agnostic service, but perhaps it would be a better experience and better monetization.

Do you think it would be better? Or is it better to stay in 90s with no javascript and no cookies?

We need to gather more feedback from publishers and to see whether the captchas influence advertising budgets and traffic conversion. If it doesn't solve the problems it is intended to solve - we'll probably rollback this change.

Are there any publishers that find my arguments reasonable, or is there a consensus that this solution is really, really bad?

Exactly this new feature is just plain dumb and only benefits advertisers, publishers will be screwed in the ass and visitors to those publishers sites will get very annoyed having to worry about captcha when clicking an ad, reminds me of the 90's, either you implement a better system to detect bot clicks or remove this annoying feature, stop only thinking about advertisers and worry about your publishers too! because if it's not for the publishers than you would have no advertisers either

PS. You say clicks don't count then who cares if a bot clicks it or a real person, once again you only care about the advertisers! You are only doing this so advertisers come back and spend more money but in the end you will just drive publishers away

Why do you want the choice from the publisher?
i do not undertand why?

The publisher offer space...
the advertiser pays for this space...
if the advertiser pays,then it is normal that he can chose the kind of click he want...it's not the domaine of the publisher.
Why should my site only send human clcks to an advertiser...i do not know what the advertiser want...
if i see an ad...saying for a faucet...if I have to solve a captcha just for going on a faucet,I prefer go away and go on sites without captcha.But this is the advertiser problem not the one of the publisher.

Oh, sorry for missing your message. It is hard to say in advance how much you can earn. Much depends on the category of your site, and whether we've seen IP addresses of the audience of your site during the last 24 hours.

Our network-wide averages with CPM estimations are here: https://a-ads.com/stats -- but your earnings could be much more or much less than that. I'd suggest to try us our for several days and then decide whether it worths it.


What went wrong with CoinURL? I don't know their story.


To be frank with you, I don't know how to conduct a case study. It sounds hard, perhaps the easier solution could be to let publishers to disable captchas for their ad units. If they do so, they won't get money from the advertisers who want 100% human traffic. On the other hand other advertisers might benefit from it.

This is a hard one. I'm mostly judging based on the whole CoinURL fiasco, where tons of people won't use sites that use CoinURL URLs because they're beyond irritating.

I think a case study may be in order here, and could give valuable data down the line. I'm not 100% sure how to quantify it, though, without doing a survey (which has response bias), as a straight A/B test wouldn't prove too valuable as I don't think variables could be locked on that would substantiate the claim one way or the other.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation, but how likely is this scenario?

Let's say (X*100)% of your audience doesn't use AdBlock, (Y*100)% of them click the ad, (Z*100)% of them sees the captcha and (W*100)% of them gets annoyed in such a manner that it really damages your site (e. g. they planned to bookmark it, but due to the easy-to-pass captcha opened in the new browser tab upon their ad click they decided not to do so).

So publishers should expect to get R times higher revenue from advertisers at the cost of C=(X*Y*Z*W)*100.0% of annoyed customers.

What do you think are the realistic values of X, Y, Z, W?

According to my estimations, R is multiple orders of magnitude higher than C, doesn't it worth it? Advertisers can put their own captcha wall on their sites or advertise intersistial ads anyway (and some of them do).

PS: Advertisers that set captcha rate to 100% are potentially loosing (W*100)% of their conversions (or more, since some people won't get annoyed in a damaging way, but will just close the browser tab). Also the visitors might attribute the captcha to their sites as well (since it is opened in the new browser tab upon click on their ad).

Because when people get hit by captchas on outgoing links, they blame it on the publishing site, not the advertising one. Sort of like when sites use interstitials before you view an article. The assumption is that the publisher is who set up the ad/captcha/pay wall, and therefore it drops their readerbase, while having no negative effect on the advertisers. Essentially, what happens is this:

1) User visits site
2) User clicks link/ad
3) User gets hit by captcha
4) User says "fuck this site" and doesn't bookmark it
5) User just visits the advertiser site directly or Googles it if they were really interested

Thanks for your feedback!

I hate captchas too and our original idea was that advertisers use analytics and distinguish/reward good publishers themselves.

But many advertisers complained that most of the clicks counted by our system either didn't reach their sites, or were just "pings" with ~100% bounce rate. Of course some of the clicks were real, but advertisers' frustration was so high that they didn't use the service long enough to get real customers and they withdrew their money. Thus publishers suffered from the decreased earnings.

Please note that advertisers don't pay per click, so when they enable captchas, they are potentially decreasing their own conversion, not the publishers' income.

Publishers don't earn per click but if their CTR is too low then they get a smaller share of the advertising budget. I expect that the earnings of fraudulent publishers will decrease but earnings of legit ones will increase.

We are collecting statistics about publishers' ad units that allows us to show captchas more frequently to the ones that fake traffic and to better distribute the funds among publishers.

In fact, this feature is introduced to increase monetization of real traffic and thus is supposed to be good for legit publishers. But why do you think that publishers suffer?

I agree the approach is horrible, this only benefits advertisers but publishers get punished, bad bad bad!

Why not just have the advertisers use Analytics to actually analyze their traffic instead of harassing potential visitors? This is a horrible approach.

How much can i earn by a website with 10,000 visitors daily ?

Deployed a new feature: Captcha rate for advertising campaigns.

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.



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

http://blog.anonymousads.com/2015/08/new-feature-captcha-rate-for-advertisers.html

Hi, thanks for your message. Please let me know your campaign id.

hi i have tried your service, successfully deposited with my bitcoin payment, but still not receiving impressions

Oh, sorry for inconvenience. Could you please tell me your campaign id and/or bitcoin transaction id?