Click here to get your ad.To commemorate two years of forum ads, ad rounds 104 and 105 will be special. Round 104 will have a variable number of ad slots. If you pay at least 0.025 BTC to the address on the page above, and you submit an ad there, and your ad is accepted, then your ad will be in round 104. Round 105 will have the usual 10 slots, though none of them will be reserved. Of those 10 slots, 5 will go to the 5 people who pay the most on the page above (ties will be broken randomly). The remaining 5 slots will go to the 5 winners of a raffle. Both rounds will be the usual 7+ days in length.
The raffle works like this: For every 0.001 BTC that you pay
above 0.025 at the above page, you get a raffle ticket. I will publish the list of raffle ticket owners once the ad payment period is over, and then I will pick 5 winners using randomness from the block chain. Each slot is worth about 2.5 BTC, so you could easily get a very good deal on a slot.
If you win a slot in round 105, I will initially use your round 104 ad. But if you PM me
after you know that you've won such a slot, you can change your ad to something else
one time, and you can use the full range of HTML/CSS (no images) usually allowed. You can sell your round 105 ad space if you want, but this counts as your one allowed change.
One ad per person. No alt accounts, and you can't directly pay several people in order to get your thing advertised several times. Referral systems are generally OK. If you try to register multiple ads and I find out, I will keep all of your ad payments. Accounts created after the time of this post can't participate in this event.
You must pay and register your ad within about 7 days. At some arbitrary time 7+ days from now, I will first shut down special_ads.php, and then a couple hours later I will tabulate the results. If I receive your BTC after that, you will not be counted. You may not change your ad for round 104 after special_ads.php is closed.
Because the forum is HTTPS, you will not receive any referrer info from clicks! If you want to track forum clicks, put something like "?bct" at the end of your URL, and look for that in your access logs.
Ad stats are here:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats . Keep in mind that you will get fewer impressions for round 104 because there will be more slots, and impressions are in any case not guaranteed.
Historical remark: I first started the ad and donation programs because the forum was running out of money to even be hosted on a low-power VPS. For the one-year ad event, the forum had a modest amount of money, and I was mostly interested in collecting money for improved forum software. Since then, the forum's wealth has increased by about 11,000%, we're talking to a software engineering firm about finally getting some great forum software built, and I'm just doing this event for the fun of it.