I can say definitively that OF has some serious work to do. I signed up as a publisher something like 4 days ago and after wasting the first 24 hours displaying an OF logo because of a manual approval process I've displayed that same logo for another 72 hours because no one is bidding.
You can't say my ad spots are bad -
slot 1 is close to the top of the page and damn near the center, and
slot 2 is just beneath it. Granted I only have 2 days worth of stats there but the averages, while falling well below my actual readership (I'm guessing adblock is responsible for that), are respectable - certainly higher than some of the other publishers in the list that actually have active bids. They're good solid ad slots and they've been sitting vacant for 72 hours, I even tried setting to minimum bid to 0 and I couldn't even GIVE the slots away. There has to be a better way for advertisers to find good ad slots.
I have no doubt that someone will eventually buy some ad space and I can start making money but honestly if I'd spent as much time in the past 72 hours contacting would-be advertisers directly as I've spent staring at that damn OF logo I probably could have sold two ad slots for a solid month the hard way. Hell, I may still have to consider that option...
I really want OF to succeed, the Bitcoin world needs both CPM and CPC advertising and right now OF seems to be the best contender in the CPM realm, but man there's still a long way to go, especially where getting ads into slots for new publishers is concerned.
I'm glad to hear the feedback, I know there is much to be done. For example, when a user signs up as a publisher, a simple PHP script to fire off an email to inform me that there is someone awaiting approval? That is my first priority, that's a 2-second change that will help tremendously. I made a huge list of things that need to be done, but there are things I am still learning about the site, me and Edd bought the site earlier in the year and I think it was 2-3 months later I was given the instruction on how to approve websites for people. I went in there, and omg, it's a loooooooong list. There are many websites that have signed up, and then I presume they got frustrated at seeing the unapproved box for a day or two and they remove the box, so when the admin goes in to check the sites, if they visit a publisher and see the site doesn't have an ad box, he won't approve it, so it just sits in the list endlessly. There are a dozen ways I would want to improve that page itself, to make it easier for an admin to filter through results and whatnot, but I think it would be possible to approve websites through the normal interface somehow, since right now in order to do anything in the admin I need to SSH into the box, change a file so it will be accessible to viewing in a browser, then proceed approving sites. I think there are several other safe ways to do that, although right now it's such an ultra-secure system that this is sort of the best way and it is functional but, yea, there is much to improve. I can see the need for approving sites, but IMHO we don't need admin to approve a website before it goes live. If a website is getting traffic, it should be automatically able to receive bids. Then maybe an admin should check which sites are added and remove those that shouldn't be there? Something to consider.
I also have an idea on how to fill up the empty ad boxes, like yours right now you have incredible traffic but it takes at least a week before your box has a lot of bids on it. Look at
bitcointrading.com's bids, right now it's actually bidding pretty low at 0.09 BTC per day, but look at how many people are bidding. It is not uncommon for the bidding to get all the way up to 1.0 BTC per day per ad square on a site like mine. In the past year, I have probably made 50-100 BTC through advertising with OperationFabulous, I'll look up the exact figure. Some of the lesser publishers, with only getting 50 pageviews per day, will not get enormous bids on them, but they will more than likely have bids if they set their minimum bid to zero, so they will get at least a bid of a few bitcents and they will make leaps and bounds more than other bitcoin advertising services. If you look at
bitcointrading's second ad box, the one on the top right, it's bid is currently at 0.011 BTC per day, although it is exactly the same in positioning to the box on the left, but for some reason everyone bids on the left box. One advertiser is getting a lot more views to his BTC than the other. I think individual advertising box bidding is a great idea, but in this case it might need a bit of tweaking. Since the website tells us how many views per BTC the box is currently getting, then perhaps a person could put a blanket advertisement site-wide for any site that meets that many views per BTC. There must be a way for us to do that. I see the site and I can just think of so many ways that I can make the site better. I might need a hand with the actual coding of how to change that, or if we re-do the whole bidding system altogether, it will probably be worth the effort. Thing is, right now the site works perfectly fine the way it is designed to do, we just need to make Operation Fabulous 2.0 basically.
Since the 'other' advertisers use per-click and per-impression bidding systems, their results should be pretty similar depending on the amount of pageviews. Can users of these services post their results, are you getting paid decently? I had horrible results. With BitcoinAdvertisers I had 2 ad boxes up for about a month and I never got a penny, so I took them off. I've left the Anonymous Ads box up there still for almost a year now and I have only made 0.03 BTC. I put up a CoinURL box and I received 0.029 BTC this month, I just signed up Sept. 1st to try it out. My Operation Fabulous boxes outperform all three services 10-to-1 most of the time, and easily paying me more daily what I would make in a month, and this is just one of my websites on there. If your results differ than mine, post below.
