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Growing A Banner Network [CoinAd.com] to 10 BILLION Monthly Banner Impressions (26)

12-10-2015 07:25 AM #1 danielbainbridge (Member)
Growing A Banner Network [CoinAd.com] to 10 BILLION Monthly Banner Impressions

Hi Guys, I met a few of you at the AW Asia event and while chatting with Hugh, he said posting this as a follow along would be interesting, that it's something different and that I'd get different insight from you guys too - so I appreciate all comments, suggestions, critique.

This is my journey to growing a new banner (and pops) advertising network to my target of 10 billion monthly banner impressions. (* I'm in month 3 now and have hit 500million monthly banner impressions - 5% of the way there... I like setting myself giant, unimaginable targets)

Note: I'm 5 months into this journey, the first 2 months were slow and more setup than live site, but I'm going to make 4 posts now, 1. Background Info and Setup, 1st Month Live, Month 2, Month 3, and then ill do one long post a month detailing my progress live, wins, thoughts, losses, revenue figures etc.

000 Background 000

Probably best to give a little background first, I'm Dan Bainbridge, I have a 7 year background in affiliate marketing as a publisher and this is all happening in the bitcoin niche - it's a bitcoin focused ads network.

So for the past 6 years my experience is in the perosnal development niche - I still own www.naturalhypnosis.com and guidedmind.com , they are white hat, nice sites, I have around 250k email subscribers and they brought in around $700k last year - I'm sure some people here could do more with them but it's decent figures, I've written around 700 short-medium copy salespages in this time and we sent a lot of email - I'm pretty aggressive for that soft niche, but then I wanted to take things even further.

I was buying bitcoin at the time and just looking and reading up on bitcoin, I found the complete lack of "marketing done right" appauling - none existent' no info products, no books, no training courses, no trading courses, no VSLs no email matketing at all, I couldn't see any network of marketers.. I saw an opportunity, to step into this space and dominate it from an aggressive, grass roots, affiliate marketing perspective - to create the network of JV partners / bitcoin web masters and lead things.

000 Entry into Bitcoin Niche 000

This could get long but I'll try and keep it short. I started building bitcoin faucets - sites that give out a tiny amount of free bitcoin. In the last year I've now got 3 of them - www.bitcoinaliens.com being the biggest, you kill aliens and earn bitcoin. It's alexa ranked 9k , something like 20million page impressions a month. I have another 11k alexa - www.weekendbitcoin.com and another; www.paidbooks.com which is 40k alexa (this one pays you in bitcoin to read books - supplied by an army of VAs scraping content from out of print books - I think we have 500 online).

These sites got big and popular (and along the way we added mobile app versions which are also popular, but thats a whole separate story), and I wanted to build an ads network, priced in bitcoin, sold in bitcoin to help me manage my ads inventory better, to take in a sponsor easier, to help change ads across all 3 sites in an instant.

I also wanted to design the ads platform with it in mind that other publishers can use it from day 1 and that it's open for any advertiser to buy from.

There were existing ads networks in this micro bitcoin space, but again, terribly done with weird ways of buying and bidding, and often needing to micro manage spends to buy on each tiny niche bitcoin site.

I wanted to build the traditional cpm banner network (and pops too) and to have a run of network feature - so sure, you can pick your spot, but you can also just drop in $5k and take the whole network, all banner sizes in just a few clicks and receive traffic for 1-2 weeks.

www.CoinAd.com was born

* note - I bought this site from a rival, it was initially a bitcoin focused PTC site, but I moved this element off to it's own domain so that CoinAd.com is JUST a banner network.

I'll write these posts daily for the next 3-4 days, so tomorrow i'll write about my Month 1, further features we added, the ongoing build, stats and growth numbers in our first month and just our plans and thoughts at the time as well as I can remember it.

Hope this is of interest, again, any thoughts, ideas, questions welcome, Cheers, Dan

12-11-2015 03:22 AM #2 caurmen (Administrator)

This is really interesting stuff!

The Bitcoin faucet idea is particularly interesting - it's hard to think of a more compelling offer than "free money!"

Looking forward to future installments.

12-12-2015 02:46 AM #3 danielbainbridge (Member)

000 More Setup 000

Maybe best to give more info on the setup / structure / thinking behind my plans.

My desire to build CoinAd.com was out of a deeper understanding of banner advertising, specifically within this niche from the past 6 months from being the buyer myself – at the point of starting it I'd acquired a 300k+ email list.. probably 30% + of this , maybe 1million+ clicks coming from banner ads buys.

* these stats are estimated, I don't have full tracking or proof of this, but I spent a lot of time making and placing banners and basically reinvested ALL of our early profits on user acquisition and growth.

So there are other networks within the bitcoin niche to buy traffic/banner ads from – but they are hard to use, amateur and require micro managing – theres not one single source to buy bulk from, so this was my primary goal. Here's some more notes on CoinAd.com design/planning:

- Modeled from BuySellAds.com (BSA).
- CPM based buying.
- I like BSA as a banner network, I like that they show the publishers and you can buy uniquely from each publisher. I think this gives some ego, commitment, belonging to the publishers to be part of it.
- BUT I wanted RUN OF NETWORK (RON) too. So You can just buy a 728x90 banner size and display it on ALL sites in the network.
- “Exclusive” - there was sooooo much junk sites on these other bitcoin banner ads networks, it took trial and error to see who was fake, frauding stats etc – CoinAd.com will be invite only! Only Alexa rank sub 100k ranked sites, with nicer designs, real traffic, and ideally where I know the owner and have trust/knowledge that the stats are real, that his ctr is real and the site is bot minimal. The idea is to cut off the total shite seen on other networks so that advertisers get a good result, trust me, and make bigger and bigger rebuys just on the RON as ultimately they know I vet quality, that publishers give fair placement and the traffic is real.
- Backfill feature – other smaller bitcoin networks didnt offer this. I want publishers to be able to put in backfill html code to another network or whatever they want – so that there's no reason not to use CoinAd.com – if we don't fill then your other ads just show anyway.
- Geo targeting - 70% of my traffic is from lesser economics - this isn't exactly the first thought for a serious buyer to want - so I wanted to segment off Tier 1 and Europe so it could be bought separately - no other mini bitcoin network offered this.

111 Month 1 111

So month 1, day 1 I only listed my own properties. Bitcoinaliens.com, weekendbitcoin.com, and paidbooks.com.

I am networking focused and I already knew probably 50-70% of the bigger bitcoin faucet owners, I chat to them on skype, so a few decent site owners already know of my plans, I've shown them my network, they're even asking me when they can join as publishers.

I delay them just to test the code, stats, database, function myself as a publisher – to iron out the bugs.

Actually things pretty much just worked – there was minimal fixing, just adding some features to the backend to; 1. be able to click a button and update the alexa ranks of sites on our listings as they change. 2. to see publisher earnings from 1 place easier, 3. to see stats on which banner sizes and geos were bought up and how much easier.

Launch / Promotion

I didn't really do a big marketing push on day 1, I think I waited a week to really test, and then just announced on our blog, direct messaged 5-10 previous direct buyers (a few bitcoin casinos who had previously placed direct ad buys with me already) or other bitcoin site owners on my skype, and made a listing on the “services announcements” subforum of bitcointalk.org (the largest bitcoin forum).

I figured a larger part of ongoing promotion simply comes from the <Buy Ads Here> html that comes with every banner - ultimately that as I list on 20-50 other big bitcoin games/faucets that my links are all over - so more "growth hacking" / marketing from within rather than real PR or marketing pushes..

Stats

* take these stats as 80% accurate, but an estimate, I didn't fully record or store all of this data.

Impressions: 30 million
Clicks: 10-20k * Estimated, I don't know tbh.
Revenue: 5 bitcoin ($1,250 approx)
Profit: 5 bitcoin ($1,250 approx)
Fill rate: Probably only 20% (if excluding the cheap ads I placed just to control ads around my sites to offers / optins of my own).

The revenue and profit are the same as basically the only sites on the network were my own. This is an estimate, and looks disappointing, but it was a trial and I was happy with it, and I remember the last 2 weeks being better than the first 2 – lets say that $900 of this came in the last 2 weeks.

Also at this point I was sharing the adspaces with other ad networks, so there were more earnings from my backfilled spots to other networks, but yeh the traffic and earnings was low from CoinAd itself – but generally I'm really happy that I actually managed to get the network built and it ran with very minimal bugs or fixes needed.

Month 2's aim was therefore to get other publishers on board and really grow the impressions reach.

12-13-2015 01:25 PM #4 danielbainbridge (Member)

222 Month 222

New Features

In month 1 we didn't have the RON feature or the Geo segmenting – the network was running in a simple way.

Both of these features came in month 2 and buying became a whole lot easier!

I was previously setting up some campaigns for some bitcoin casinos, having to place like 16x ads on 4x sites, list them all separately. With RON this changed to only needing to place 3x ads, AND they could buy ONLY Tier 1 (usa,uk,ca,nz,aus) traffic, and I could sell it at DOUBLE the regular rate as along with Geo targeting we can price the different geos differently.

New Publishers

This month I started to add my "friends"/jv partners I've met along the way – just 2-3 of them at first, but when they had their first payday I was really confident enough to reach out and really ask all the bigger bitcoin game/faucet sites to add too. Probably we go 10 or so other publishers on board this month.

So last month we had something like 30million banner impressions, this month it rose to around 100m+.

At this point I start to experience the effect of only being 30% of the network as my own publisher sites, but also taking 20% profit from the remaining 70% of impressions generated by the other partners… Skip ahead another 1-2 months and this really matures into the realization that the ads network ownership is the key – I don't need to own the publisher site and build it and manage it, if I just have the ads network and control banner traffic on everyones sites and take 20% then the 20%s add up to more.. and I gain access to mass traffic.. But of course having some publisher sites which are profitable helps as then I have somewhere to send traffic..

Price Increase

I launched with $0.05 cpm pricing on banners – this was a trial rate, I just wanted to try and get buys straight away and fill up the market and have buyers using the site.

In month 2 all the spots increased to $0.10 – still cheap, but better.

We also started to gather the emails (optional input) of all ads buyers - we started to email them 1x a week or so, or in this instance we mailed them to let them know the price is increasing etc.

A Powerful Asset Emerges

CoinAd really starts to work for me at this point – all of a sudden it's gone from just me and my sites, to having 10 other big publishers using it.

The traffic reach explodes, and combined with being able to RON buy, but also to be able to Geo target, CoinAd starts to get really useful.

The buys/revenue is up, a couple of casinos drop in some 2-4btc spends ($1k+) each, the new publishers are sort of happy with the small earnings but see the promise of more and they see and trust that I'm focused on actually pro-actively selling 1-1.

I'm also buying up the spare inventory a bit cheaper than the market rate – publishers are happy with this as they get more earnings, and I'm happy as I want to buy more traffic and control the traffic in the bitcoin niche.

So one example of this starting to be extremely powerful is that we started to buy up ALL mobile traffic and placing banners for our apps – we made 1 landing page with links to all 2 (then 3) of them – www.coinverting.com/apps – and bought up ALL banner sizes, all mobile traffic on ALL sites. Our mobile apps started to get 1000+ installs a day, profit 3x increased on them (this grew to 2000+ installs over the next 6 weeks), and we hit 2nd / 3rd in both the iOS and Android store for a search of “bitcoin”. * This probably was the first thing to really put me on a radar of a few bitcoin companies in Silicon Valley.

Stats

Revenue: 20 bitcoin ($5,000 approx) * 4x increase on previous month.
Profit: 6 bitcoin ($1,500 approx)
Banner Impressions: 100 million + (1% of my target of 10 billion :P)
Clicks Generated: 100k * Estimate, I'm unsure
Fill rate: Probably 50% (if excluding the cheap ads I placed just to control ads around my sites to offers / optins of my own).

At this point I'm really excited, plans going forwards are to:

- Continue on to get ALL of the big / quality bitcoin publishers – there are still a few big ones not on board.
- Try and expand out of just faucets/games and get real blogs which have more valuable.

12-13-2015 02:26 PM #5 conrad_birdie (Member)

Interesting thread, please keep updating.

12-14-2015 12:46 AM #6 thuglife (Member)

Can you talk more about your team/partner? How did you guys meet?
What made you wanna work together on this?

12-14-2015 02:05 AM #7 danielbainbridge (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by thuglife View Post
Can you talk more about your team/partner? How did you guys meet?
What made you wanna work together on this?
Good question. So My background is 6-7 years in affiliate marketing, building the hypnosis, meditation, and also subliminal and positive affirmations sites.. During this time I became increasingly unhappy with my partner - I wanted to do things bigger, spend more on advertising, send more email.. be MUCH more aggressive.. I felt like I was being held back and stuck in my 50/50 partnership. I dropped the bomb that I wanted to split, while setting up this bitcoin business with those principles in mind.. I feel justified in wanting to split as the bitcoin biz has got to huge scale (but not the same profit levels, but they are moving in the right direction).

So, from this experience I am VERY hesitant to share with a partner or co-founder. I own 100% of it, I ask for things to be done and my developer and staff do them. But I'm not a total dick, my staff get paid well, we actually live together in a little team of 5 of us in Thailand, I flew them here, pay their rent, and this is how they came together:

Dev - First thing I needed was a developer, I found someone on a bitcoin forum to just install faucet scripts and setup my sites, paid hourly - this was just 1 month in. As I saw the bigger picture I knew I needed him/someone fulltime - I asked him to drop his other clients, work with me 100% of his time, and ill pay his upper rate / more than anyone else. Hes been with me a year, it's a real bromance, I pay him even more now and some bonuses when we have good months - ALL of my profit has gone back into the business until recently (now have some small profit savings in bitcoin) and 80% of this reinvestment has gone to him.
Writing - My brother, he wasn't reaching his full potential, was working an admin job, hes a smart guy, just quiet. I brought him to Thailand with the idea of learning and then running the day to day of the business - he does this now - emailing, blogging, managing the faucets, facebook page, other stuff, many hats.
Apps - I have more simple arrangement of profit share with my apps developer - I met him in Thailand and there just seemed synergy - he could make apps but not get traffic, I have mass traffic and want apps - I made a deal with him.
Sales - Recently hired a sales manager for CoinAd.com - this will be detailed in the next 2 months reports, but basically he took the site from 50% to 150% fill this month and we raised our pricing again because of it. He was a friend of a friend from university, we lost touch for 10 years but he emailed me like 4x asking for an intern position, read a bunch of books I told him to read, didn't take no for an answer and had a sales background.. there wasn't actually a full role for him, but hes made one for himself and I'm really excited that hes keen and staying and think he could be the secret to CoinAd.com success in these early days - he has 30+ hours a week to cold email clients, I was struggling to dedicate 5 hours a week to it.
Mom - Gotta employ your moms guy, tax breaks

So I don't exactly have a solid formula for recruiting, hiring, my team is mixed... but 2 things:

- I don't give out ownership. I want to ask for things to be done and for them to be done. I'm not always right but I want the decision and the responsibility, and I aim BIG.
- I'm fair / more than - my staff have great deals, and we're actually friends and socialise togther, it's a pretty good team

12-14-2015 07:36 AM #8 danielbainbridge (Member)

333 Month 3 333

More Publishers Onboard

This month we really exploded, we took on like 3-4 BIGGER publishers and a bunch of others too, now we basically have 95% of all of the micro bitcoin traffic in the world – were on all of the big publisher sites that give away bitcoin – some of the larger ones have multiple sites so we signed up 1 guy and he lists us on 3-15 sites. At the end of this month we have 28 publishers with 60 sites total listed between them.

Hired a Sales Manager

This month I hired a full time sales manager – 2 weeks nothing much happens but I train him up, give him my contacts, we setup standard emails to send out and I chat and copy him in a lot on sales convos or rebuys, and then he starts to take over as he learns the platform.

Problems

One major problem I had this month was with a publisher cheating me – I can't exactly tell how hes doing it but basically I KNOW he has maybe 10x less traffic than our biggest publishers, but he is earning 2-3x more than them… it doesn't take a rocket scientist.

Through the month I ask him, then I warn him, then I severly warn him one last time – all along he denies cheating and I go back to looking into his sites and traffic, also getting my developer to look more in-depth. I basically know he is cheating and bot inflating his impressions, or has some dark pages somewhere with 1000s of my banners on and just refreshing them via bots..

I banned him, severed the relationship – its a shame, but it's his loss, hes literally an idiot and could have earnt $300 a week from us legitimately.

I broadcast this message to our other publishers to instil fear and honesty between them as basically this guy and his sites should have been untouchable, but I'm 100% sure hes cheating. I also broadcast it to our advertisers to show I'm not taking any shit, and give a few of them some small buys due to the money I saved by not paying the cheating guy out this week.

Delays

It's going to take me longer than I wanted to take on quality publishers like bitcoin blogs and news sites… but / because of a chance to gain momentum I think with this idea first…

Pivot – A New Network

We decided to work on a “rival” ad network to ourselves. As mentioned before there are other ads networks in this bitcoin micro niche which are hard to use and have weird traffic bidding methods and require micro managing spends…

I want to kill these off once and for all, and CoinAd isn't enough.. it is private and invite only, and only quality sites.

So I'm pivoting a little and adding a near-duplicate network of CoinAd – it will be called ww.BlockAdz.com – and it will be for JUNK / ANY traffic. I will soften the rules so publishers can place as many ads as they want (as they do with other networks), but I will keep the run of network buying so its easy for buyers to buy – and I will just set a market rate 5x lower cpm, and then try and raise it if the network is full and just find a balanced market rate for this lower quality, higher impression traffic.

The idea is that this will let me TOTALLY dominate the micro bitcoin niche.

It will be a 4 week development time..

Revenue Growth

Basically the platform revenue grows up during this time, not really because of the sales manager, but we just start taking in more buys, I guess there's a synergy effect between having more publishers on the network so literally our links back and <Advertise Here> messages are literally seen by 100s of 1000s daily.

I also personally sold some larger btc packages and rebuys to casinos and to a few new clients.

Every week this week the weekly earnings have been 15-20btc.

Stats

Revenue: 70 bitcoin ($22,000 approx) * another 4x increase on last month
Profit: 6 bitcoin ($5,000 approx)
Banner Impressions: 250 million +
Clicks Generated: 220k * This is now not an estimate, this is what it was and I know the stats more accurately from this point onwards
Fill rate: Approx 80% - with 100% fill on Tier 1 and 2 traffic and mobile traffic. Lesser economics countries remain with some space.

Thoughts

I'm laser focused on this ads network now, this $5k extra profit this month basically just changes our whole business – till now we have tight profit margins to feed a 4 people earning salaries, and then there's a little money left over; $3-5k or so profit , which usually goes back in to buy advertising – this has basically 2-3x+ our profit and led to much more room to move and grow - $5k doesn't sound like a massive amount but traffic is cheap in this niche, untapped, and it will help us grow and go a long way.

Plans going forwards:

- launch BlockAdz
- try and 100%+ fill the network and increase pricing 20%+
- try and get existing publishers to place more banners – to get 1-2x more placements from the biggest 3-4 publishers (where they have more space to give) would increase the network size by 10-30% alone.
- try to sink our rival ad network and really take #1 spot – offer incentives / bonuses for remaining publishers using them to remove their ads and only use us?

12-15-2015 03:24 AM #9 epicskillz (Senior Member)

Very interesting follow-along!

This could grow into something that's really long-term and profitable and could be sold for a large payday; something which could be grown vertically and horizontally - can totally imagine taking this to the bigger "general finance" market etc etc and growing organically.

Look forward to updates!

12-15-2015 03:31 AM #10 biozai (Member)

Loving the commitment to long term growth and ignoring near term profits. Keep it up!

12-15-2015 07:38 AM #11 beckslash (Member)

I think the idea is great and since the niche is laser focused some cool things can be achieved with that traffic. I have a few questions...

Can you target by desktop and mobile? I only saw geo targeting mentioned on your site.

Do you have any restrictions on the banner styles or what's being promoted?

Any minimum bitcoin deposit to get started advertising?

12-15-2015 11:14 AM #12 njosten (Member)

yay, let's cloak btc ponzi schemes. jokes aside, interesting follow-along (Y)

12-16-2015 02:54 AM #13 danielbainbridge (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by biozai View Post
Loving the commitment to long term growth and ignoring near term profits. Keep it up!
I'm always focused on revenue, even from Day 1, and actually in this case study I show the $1.5k then $5k profit, but this is only on the CoinAd.com asset itself - I also own www.bitcoinaliens.com/faucet (9k alexa), www.weekendbitcoin.com, www.paidbooks (pays you to read books), www.bitsforclicks.com (PTC in bitcoin), and then 3x mobile apps - www.coinverting.com/apps - for instance the apps have 300k installs, and get 2k new a day and are full of advertising - so basically CoinAd.com is profitable in itself AND it feeds traffic round to all my other assets which are profitable too.

Total domination of this niche, won't accept anything less!

Quote Originally Posted by epicskillz View Post
Very interesting follow-along!

This could grow into something that's really long-term and profitable and could be sold for a large payday; something which could be grown vertically and horizontally - can totally imagine taking this to the bigger "general finance" market etc etc and growing organically.

Look forward to updates!
Yes! Really wanting to expand out of the bitcoin niche - so basically will be adding "Categories" and you can imagine as CoinAd as it is now is all just 1 category "Bitcoin" - Category 2 will be Finance(binary/forex), and category 2 will be Biz Opp / IM - I've got some reach into these areas and think I could add in publishers, the pricing could be more for these categories too. This will be detailed much more in the next update, but I'm sort of up to date now.. next update coming at the end of this month.

Quote Originally Posted by beckslash View Post
I think the idea is great and since the niche is laser focused some cool things can be achieved with that traffic. I have a few questions...
1. Can you target by desktop and mobile? I only saw geo targeting mentioned on your site.
2. Do you have any restrictions on the banner styles or what's being promoted?
3. Any minimum bitcoin deposit to get started advertising?
1. If you look into the geo selection the bottom "geo" is mobile - as it's desktop placements mobile is only a smaller portion - but as we grow I will expand this feature to choose either desktop or mobile and then to be able to geo segment within mobile too - right now you can't geo segment within the mobile segment.
2. No adult. No drugs. No Guns. Everything else is ok - casino is probably 50% of the buys (but mostly specific bitcoin casinos)
3. Mmmm it's like $1 minimum I think, maybe $15 for run of network? * But its all in bitcoin right now, another feature I want is CC payments... next month maybe.

01-02-2016 09:54 AM #14 danielbainbridge (Member)

Looking back on this post I think there's probably about 6-8 weeks missing :P But I can't really go back now, basically take it that month 2 actually took 2 months to progress to this level, and month 3 took 2 months too - but that they were similar - 70-80btc profit each month and we're up to present day

Yearly Review

Not really a full year but 5-6 months to look back on and theres been some really fantastic month on month growth. Here's a graph - 1.7billion banner impressions served, as tracked by google analytics (although I think it's a bit more if I look at our rolling monthly site stats):



Now October felt pretty big but then we stepped up in November and then really jumped again towards the end of December. I still think there is still a lot further we can go with this because of the pivot and blockadz (discussed next).

And actually this is still only 500 million impressions a month, which sounds good, but still makes us a TINY network(and only 5% of the way to my target of 10 billion per month) - I feel like we have gone up a level now though, we are really, actually the largest bitcoin focused ads network, and perhaps we are now actually on the bottom rung of the "real ads networks ladder" - in that a lot of people might start a platform or have a mini platform, but we've got a certain, respectable amount of traffic now, more than most mini networks ever get (?)

444 Month 4 444

Problems This Month - BIG Server Problems

This spike, or hopefully the new norm or the start of real growth, but it was quite a jump, it knocked our server offline, put us to 110% capacity.

We tried to upgrade our server (we use digital ocean cloud hosting so upgrading is pretty quick), but we messed up some settings - traffic really changes at this level.. any server is fine at a lower level, but some unoptimized settings, when you grow to this level, the problems and lags really compound.

We then got some other 'expert' involved, he made it worse.

Lesson learned here - Any fucking melon will tell me they're an expert to try and help out and get in my good books, but really I should just pay upfront for the best and get it handled. It's more costly to wait and lose $3k in ads revenue!

Finally got help from a Russian hosting company owner with real server setup experience. Thank god for Russian developers.

We had around 5 days of serious 30-90% downtime, dark days, right over Christmas and after, probably lost $3-5k in revenue but learn a few lessons and my patience/tolerance barrier is strengthened for the road ahead too :P

Sales Increase! A $10k Order! And A Price Increase

Towards the end of last month and then into this month we saw a real increase in sales - previously we got to around 70% full, this month we are now 400% full - or we are full, booked solid for 4 weeks into the future based on current monthly impressions numbers.

This is because of 2 things:




The positive effect of this, obviously aside from earning more money, is that we can put the price up now - so now the prices are $0.15 / 1000 for all adsizes except 728x90 which is $0.18 and 500x400 which is $0.25. Happy days.


New Publishers Onboard

Because of the huge backlog of ads bought now we just had to make another real effort this month to reach out 1-by-1 to all other decent freebie bitcoin sites, probably sent out about 30-40 emails and got another 10 sites or so onboard - grew by 30% or so again - sort of getting near the limit of the high traffic bitcoin freebie sites..

Pivot

Ok, we're pivoting, not massively, but the original target was to "build CoinAd.com to 10billion impressions a month". Now it's not just CoinAd.com anymore, I've added www.blockadz.com - a "rival" ads network (difference explained next) and this has been 30 million impressions per month. And next month I want to add ANOTHER ad network, BUT this will be an ADULT network - i.e. to display banners on porn sites.

It can/could be possible to do all of this on just CoinAd.com , but I think there is logic for having these 2 extra sites, so now the target of 10billion monthly banner impressions will be with these 3 sites combined.

Blockadz

The idea was to create a rival ads network to ourselves with a few key differences, but basically so that we can really sweep up all traffic in this bitcoin niche. CoinAd.com is great, but we went 1 direction with it - private, invite only, quality publishers only - simply because there are a TON of crap quality, off the shelf bitcoin freebie sites, and they spam 5-10-20-30 ads per page from 3-5 different crap ads networks...

... but meh, all of this crap traffic is still worth something, it's low hanging fruit, I might as well have it, and the best sites I can send them an email, educate them and invite them over to CoinAd... so blockadz is:



The aim is still to hopefully have it earn well for publishers, then they will list us in good places and multiple ads..

In this first 3 weeks of being online I've raised the pricing from $0.02 up to $0.05 (in 3 steps) and the network is full 100% for 2+ weeks. It's taken in around $1000 or so.. Looks really positive as a start but obviously small numbers.

PORN Plans

Ok, I've been 7 years in internet marketing and never done anything in adult. It's about time!

We're going to enter the adult space - 1st as an ads network - to put banners on bitcoin angled porn sites. Theres 1-2 bitcoin cam sites already and a few other smaller sites. I think to really make it work i'll have to build out my own porn sites just to ensure there is volume and properties to buy on in the adult network soon - I have a few ideas, I basically know something is possible and the adult traffic numbers are huge. I'm even wondering if all of the work I'm putting in here is just toddler-training in preparation for the real money and real numbers that await in the adult niche.

Other Plans

Category System: We are dominating this "micro bitcoin" niche/category - but that is all the network is, and its the cheapest form of traffic. Next step is to add categories and to be able to price differently in different categories - the first extra categories will be:

  1. Quality bitcoin news sites and blogs - as if I'm honest our faucets and games are below this level - if we get some of these sites onboard and can fill the traffic then the pricing should be $0.50+ cpm rather than $0.15
  2. Finance/Binary/Forex - again a higher quality / more valuable category. I have some contacts with some reach into this area and it's semi related to bitcoin.. well, not really but if bitcoin becomes more mainstream then it will be closer.
  3. Self Improvement - my background is in this niche so I should be able to pull some blogs in here and again the pricing could be $0.50 - $1 cpm, I know a lot of people in this area and there isn't really a use of banners/banner networks as a traffic source AT ALL... so should be space for it to be me, especially if I can show my friends / jv partners the benefits and traffic sharing we can do easily..


Paypal/Stripe/Credit Cards: Yeh, I need to add regular ways to pay, especially if adding other categories, I'm leaving money on the table, and likewise, a paypal cashout would be better for publishers in these new categories too. I'll have this within January.

Stats

Coinad:

545 million banner impressions
505k clicks served
100bitcoin revenue, 25btc profit ($10,500 approx)
Fill rate: 400%

Blockadz:

38million banner impressions
17k clicks served
5 bitcoin revenue, 1btc profit ($430 approx)
Fill rate 200% - I'm going to stop showing this stat now, were likely going to be 100-200%+ full all the time.
* 370 publishers joined in it's first 3 weeks online, so it's got more publishers than CoinAd, but obviously smaller ones - and growing by 30 a day now.

Plans Going Forwards

01-02-2016 11:46 AM #15 caurmen (Administrator)

This continues to be absolutely fascinating - watching an empire in the making! Thanks very much, and looking forward to the next update!

01-06-2016 09:51 AM #16 ty_c310 (Member)

Love watching the progress on this, keep up the good work! I have a feeling this is going to be huge.

01-06-2016 10:17 AM #17 Mr Green (Administrator)

Really interesting follow along mate! You're onto a winning idea for sure.

"* 370 publishers joined in it's first 3 weeks online, so it's got more publishers than CoinAd, but obviously smaller ones - and growing by 30 a day now."

I'd be interested to know your strategy for acquiring so many in such a short time.

01-06-2016 01:50 PM #18 danielbainbridge (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by Mr Green View Post
"* 370 publishers joined in it's first 3 weeks online, so it's got more publishers than CoinAd, but obviously smaller ones - and growing by 30 a day now."

I'd be interested to know your strategy for acquiring so many in such a short time.
Well we already have a huge network and reach and traffic in this niche so a lot came from within but here are the strategies:


* While writing this I realise that THE most obvious thing hasn't been done - we place banner for blockadz on blockadz but we have COINAD! A HUGE network with 600million banner impressions monthly - and we haven't placed any there yet... MASS publisher signups coming soon! Watch this space for the end of Jan update. But here's a sneak preview:

When I posted above just on the 2nd of January Blockadz was:

Quote Originally Posted by danielbainbridge View Post

38million banner impressions
17k clicks served
5 bitcoin revenue, 1btc profit ($430 approx)
Fill rate 200% - I'm going to stop showing this stat now, were likely going to be 100-200%+ full all the time.
* 370 publishers joined in it's first 3 weeks online, so it's got more publishers than CoinAd, but obviously smaller ones - and growing by 30 a day now.
So in the 4 days since then we are now on 102 million banner impressions and 800 publishers... I've not been more excited since, well, last week in Bangkok probably

In 2 weeks in December we served 38 million impressions, in the last 4 days we've served another 60 million, with around 16million coming in the last 24 hours - things are really getting crazy.

02-05-2016 06:14 AM #19 danielbainbridge (Member)

444 Month 4 444

OMG Kill Me Now

January has been the single biggest stressful business month of my life ever. TLDR - we had 20+ days of 30-50% downtime, and 7 days of 90% downtime. Probably lost $20-30k in missed ads placements while paying out $10k for fixes.. epic badness, but it does have a fairy-tale princess rescue type ending...

The increase in traffic at the end of the last month sustained and increased and it was too much for our current setup. We scaled our server vertically from $160 to $320 to $640 droplets on digital ocean, it didn't help.

We got help from someone, he made it worse.

We got help from another guy, he assed about for 2-3 weeks, every server change he made, made things worse, going from 70% uptime to 30% to almost 0% and complete incapacity to buy ads.

Finally I got introduced to an actual expert - someone with extreme specific experience in this exact area - creation of advertising networks and setup of servers for mass volume (his previous client serves 30 million banners a minute - our half daily volume).

Long story short, he cost $180 an hour, I pulled the trigger and racked up a $10k bill with him - it was either do this or lose everything really, but now also in talks for simple revenue share for ongoing management and scale.

Re-Development

The work he actually did was pretty epic.

Originally my ads platform was written entirely by my main web developer - but this was shortsighted sort of - he hasn't got the experience of making an ads server or coding a database for scale.

The database and the method of serving ads was a mess - fine for small-medium volume, but at scale it just fell apart, there was too much data being transmitted, too many direct database calls, no caching of data for efficiency... at scale the database just couldn't hold up.

It needed an entire recode, and then the server needed optimizing and basically just destroying and setting up from new. The good news on this was that the server costs went from $900 to $300.

Anyway, $20k lost, probably more, and a $10k bill, no profit this month :P.....

BUT it's been an EPIC learning experience - even in terms of patience, stress management, handling a crisis, pushing through pain, staying committed... wow, I feel like I've gone through 10 years of personal development! And then in terms of web dev and tech knowledge, I always lack in this, I'm just marketing, but again, I really feel I've leveled up and at least know what is needed or the standards we must build to and challenges associated... damn, epic month, what an experience, who else gets to have that experience and go through it?! BOOM!

Other Plans Delayed

When I wrote my last update here things were pretty good and the plan was to duplicate up and build an adult ads serving network off the same platform - this is obviously delayed, and probably not just by 1 month but by 2-3 now as we do more work on these sites to stabalize them and serve ads properly and cut a deal with the new consultant - and then it would be him to build the adult ads network. It needs to be really.

BlockAdz isn't Profitable! :P

During this whole process Blockadz has had some more uptime but has grown a LOT.

It has grown too fast, I can't really fill all the space.

It is BIGGER reach than CoinAd.

It is MUCH lower quality (but balanced out by lower pricing) and there is much more FRAUD!

The pricing is 3x cheaper.... but actually even at $0.05 I couldn't sell it all and couldn't afford to buy the remaining myself so I've had to reduce the price to $0.03

So there is revenue, but really I've placed a lot of ads myself, there isn't really profit - so progress towards my goal of 10billion banner impressions per month is strong, but the revenue isn't flowing in, at least not from this 2nd network... yet... working on it tho, just needs price optimizing and hopefully now with stability we can make progress.

221st Biggest Ads Network in the World!

Ok, this did get solved, in the last week of January we got up and running, and I don't even know how but traffic came back like a tidal wave, somehow we reached epic epic numbers.

Also our consultant placed Quantcast pixel and right now it apparently is telling him that www.blockadz.com is the 221st largest ads network in the world - COOL!

With only having placed it for a week I wonder if we can actually get measured within the top 100 in a little time and a little more growth.

Plans Going Forwards




Stats

Coinad:



Blockadz:



Totals:

1 BILLION , 750 MILLION banner impressions served!

This is more like it! 17.5% of the way to my target of 10billion a month - it's actually in sight now!

02-05-2016 10:26 AM #20 zeno (Administrator)

This is a really great follow-along!

I like that you focused in on a very specific slice of the market rather than "just another ad network"

02-05-2016 11:58 AM #21 caurmen (Administrator)

Still really enjoying this one!

And very interested to hear you're looking at integrating Conventional Money too. Definitely let us know when that's in place...

03-05-2016 07:35 AM #22 danielbainbridge (Member)

666 Month 6 666

TLDR: Mmmm, things are ok, DOUBLED up again, blockadz is still crap, made $5k trialing BINARY offers yay!

Stable and Bigger, but less full

February was a lot better than January - the sites stayed stable, there was little bug fixes and some server things to fix, but weve had 95%+ uptime and really minimal problems in comparison to last month.

This month CoinAd AGAIN doubled in impressions numbers (see quickstats below), which is great, helps me to reach closer my ego target for 10billion monthly impressions a month, but the network is now definitely harder to fill, were probably 20% full or 1-2 weeks full rolling, with some spots busier than others (rather than 400% as previously). This brings me on to too related issues - sales manager problems (?) and investigating CPA/binary/affiliate campaigns myself.

Yay! Made $5k from Binary Trading Offers

So because of the gaps in ads spaces I started looking for CPAS / binary / forex stuff to promote ourselves - buy up the ads (a little cheaper), so that the publishers still earn, spend a few $100 and just see what we earn back - if anyting, and it's not a big deal if nothing, the publishers on the network get some money and stay happy and we try something else.

Anyway, it worked, spent around $1.5k on ads - probably $2.5k worth at regular pricing, and made $5.2k in FTDs.

SCALE this!

BlockAdz STILL isn't Profitable! :P

No improvement in Blockadz, I'm basically just not really making profit on this site, but it's got huge numbers, I'm buying ads there myself with the small profit there is and buying ads to my profitable stuff - my sites and my apps.

I don't want to kill the network as it can be useful to me and feed my sites, and if I increase my profit margins a bit or add other profitable sites in the future then I can fund blockadz more, get more traffic myself.

There are also technical solutions which were working on which should help a LOT - more accurate impression tracking, and robot detection - so ads wont show to robots browsing publisher sites - which is a problem in these lower quality faucet sites.

But for now its just coasting along, and I've had to cut the price down to $0.03 - but still at that price the traffic is low quality so I'm giving some buyers 50% discounts on that even still. It can keep coasting, it will get useful.

Plans Going Forwards




Stats

Coinad:



Blockadz:

Last month we displayed 1,741,980,081 banner impressions,
serving 307,438 clicks, across 3,913 publisher websites



Totals:

2.9 billion impressions served total. 29% of the way to my target.

04-16-2016 04:57 AM #23 danielbainbridge (Member)

666 Month 6 666

This is a little late this month as I have a whole out war going on.

Epic DDOS Wars

I've been ddosed maybe 10-15x over the last 2 weeks or so, there's no ransom note or threat or personal message or anything, and it's not just my ads network, they are targeting multiple sites of mine, often they will all go down at the same time.. so I think it is personal against me, it could be a rival but it doesn't seem to be just a one off or “just a script kiddie hacker”, really seems sustained and targeted.

Before getting into bitcoin I didn't have an enemies, I'm basically just that quiet dude who runs a business and reads a lot of books, who goes to Vegas to network but doesn't take enough coke to really fit in… So not really sure who it is but I do have a few suspects; people who we banned from our network, or one in particular who runs a rival ads network and has tried to fraud us out of a few $1000, or it could just be bigger than us, there is a whole political war going on in bitcoin on a higher level, but I'm not really part of it…. Meh, I dunno, and even if I did I would be limited to take action in return anyway…

So I've spent much of this month chatting with my developers, implementing Cloud Flare protection where there wasn't (stupidly) previously, and re-deving some of our databases and site structure so that if we do get ddosed it's harder to fully kill us (and so more expensive), i.e. things like making our databases more efficient so we make caches of data and only call them live every few minutes rather than with every live impression.

Anyway, as I'm not technical often I just go to bed while a whole out attack is going on once my devs know about it, so it's been frustrating and stressful in some ways, but in others it's just been an exercise in staying calm, and while it's all going on I just buy advertising elsewhere, manage campaigns, and map out future businesses or things to fix/improve on other sites. The scale of this was such that if I just focus on it then I'd get nothing else done and it would impact me much more.

Let My Sales Manager Go

Last month I let my ads manager go, he wasn't fired, it was more just the role than him.

We were trying to sell traffic for $0.15/1000; which I know sounds cheap to you but it is actually expensive for our niche – my rivals are selling for $0.05 or less, so basically we were trying to sell ferraris when what we actually have is bicycles.

We would run a trial for a new big/real client, they would get crap results, make no money and not go beyond our $100 trial or not rebuy. There was no point in having a sales manager.

So I let him go, I've brought the price down to $0.10 and $0.12, we are full again, backlogged a little and yeh the “clients” he had and was managing, they rebought with minimal time from me, and 2 with just coupon codes for 20-30% discounts.

So I tried that little experiment, we went big with it, it didnt work out, but I got that “I need a sales manager to pursue clients” bug out of my system, the quality of traffic would need to be a lot better for that method, so for now I just refocus back to systematizing the network – adding features that make buying easier, or to buy in ways the market wants and just focus on increasing volume.

BOOM – 150+ Server “Vortex”!

This month I finally signed the deal with the guy who fixed all of our server problems, we've been 95% stable since, but there have been some technical challenges such as images not displaying across all servers/nodes and issues integrating Cloud Flare into the new server setup.

We now are no longer on 4-5 servers on Digital Ocean, but have a “vortex” of 150+ mini servers that all talk to each other and serve ads instantly, anywhere in the world (previous was NYC servers so fast in America, crap everywhere else).

Difficult Move: This move was bloody difficult over the end of March and start of April, and it was at the same time as a lot of the ddosing which made it even harder - we had to investigate every issue 2x and determine if it was just ddos or technical setup problems, if we would be ok during normal traffic volumes, and how to solve the ddos, how to develop despite it.

Real big nightmare and during it I paid a lot of bonuses out to publishers who didn't earn that well for 2 weeks in a row, and also gave bonuses to advertisers whose ads messed up, didn't serve, broke, got lost. We also bought an increased amount of ads ourselves as the network emptied because of all the problems - profit is lower this month.

2x-3x CTR

The main improvement we've seen from moving servers is that we now serve ads in around 0.05 to 0.1 of a second – previously it could be as bad/slow as 1-2 seconds (which means in prime top of page positions the user scrolls down the page before the ad even loads and ctrs are crap.

So since the change ctrs have increased 2-3x, and along with the price drop this has really helped to fill us back up again. It is great value for buyers right now till we find our new optimum pricing again.

Stats

Coinad:




Blockadz:




Summary

Stats down 20% and clicks down 50%. Profit lower due to paying bonuses to publishers and buying ads ourselves when others weren't due to network being on and off a lot.

This was actually our toughest month, with the ddoses and the server move we had some real bulk downtime. Things are better than they seem and we will do much better numbers in April.

Plans going forwards

Jeez, just have a fun month, enjoy being stable, have the network fill up and make some money - get stable and chill out a bit.

I've been living in Thailand and Vietnam for 18 months though so I'm coming back to England for a while and I'll probably rent an apartment in London and network a bit - got an invite to the google offices and theres some bitcoin people in London, also arranging to go to Amsterdam to meet a client and some bitcoin casino guys.

04-16-2016 05:41 AM #24 thuglife (Member)

Nice update. Are you pushing the binary offer through Clicksure/Clickbetter?

04-16-2016 11:10 AM #25 danielbainbridge (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by thuglife View Post
Nice update. Are you pushing the binary offer through Clicksure/Clickbetter?
I'm going through BrokerClicks.com , I know they take their cut but they link up to multiple brokers and actually the (I believe) produce a lot of the offers for Clicksure anyway - and I've got access to the inner team there, this was a real totally new niche and style of business for me so I like having them handle it a,, and also in talks about progressing to a unique bitcoin based lander and funnel for me, although really I think I need to increase my volume a fair bit before we hit that stage...
.. and they give access to the emails of signups so going to start building out email sequences (as theirs suck a bit) and my background is email.

11-02-2016 01:33 PM #26 maxzhongguotong (Member)

Great Job Daniel ! How`s it going so far ? Golden nuggets in here

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