October 28, 2012 | Author: Mircea Popescu

Basically it's a sort of Google Adswhatever, with two main differences : you pay in Bitcoin and they actually provide tracking.

Out of pure curiosity I sunk a Bitcoin into their system. The expense was quite informative : I now know they show country-and-city geolocation for all clicks, as well as links to all sites which provided impressions and so forthi.

I also know they suck at filtering. For instance :

coinurl-1

Selling me the msn index bot as an impression ?! Really ?

At least the delicious candour of actually stating that on their site pleads in favour of the theory they're not fudging any data (which, in the business they're in, is quite rare).

coinurl-2 Moving right along, here's a run down of the sites sporting my campaign at the moment :

  • pantyhosecandids.com is a dubious TGPii sort of thing (or maybe it's a MFA ?).
  • pantyhosephotos.info is the same (exact) thing, pretty certainly run off the same db etc.
  • hotexgirlfriends. thumblogger.com, nylonfap.com, yologf.blogspot.com are more of the same.
  • badgerbadgerbadger.com and sedicinoni.tv certainly are MFA traps.
  • d2k5.com is some private forum with something like five users.
  • argentinawarez.com is probably too hot for brazil, comicskulled.net46.net/etc seems to be some sort of similar thing.
  • That mon-quotidien.wg.vu thing seems caught into a self-refresh loop, I wonder how lucrative it is.

That about covers their list. Going through their public stats page I notice entries such as jocuri10.org, doing 20.4k (6.9k) impressions today, 23 clicks and 0.00092924 BTC on average per clickiii, e-referat.net, referatele.net and an entire slew of "proiecte de succes" as they're called in their native tongue. There are a few bitcoin sites there too, but mostly the "free microbitcoins" type, not particularly useful in any advertising sense.

In short : CoinUrl sucks. There is absolutely no reason on Earth to pay Bitcoins (or anything else for that matter) to be advertised there. Nobody cares that there's 1.7 million, billion or gadzillion impressions, clicks or whatever if their context is dubious porn sites that survive out of bought traffic, warez crap and other traps for the mentally stunted.

This is a pity, because the frontend is really nice. The only way forward would be to ban all advertisers currently in the system and then hold talks with selected publishers. In the end only allow as advertisers real venues with real readership : bloggers who actually contribute something, maybe some service sites that do something useful. Start in the Bitcoin zone and slowly expand outwards towards economics & politics.

So here's a word to the CoinUrl owner : drop me a line if you want to make CoinUrl into something worthwhile. Maybe we can work something out.

PS. As I was proofing this...

coinurl-3

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  1. Really as far as the tracking goes they're a marvel to behold, Google would do well to just throw out their entire crapfest masquerading as a service and replace the entire frontend with an outright CoinUrl copy. []
  2. Thumbnail Gallery Preview, a site that was making money in porn cca 1998 or something. []
  3. mircea_popescu ;;calc 0.00092924 * 23 * 10.44123
    gribble 0.223155397
    A quarter a day... []
Category : Bitcoin  | 14 responses.