Hey Guys! Here's a breakdown of my first experience with the CoinPayU advertising mechanism, and a guide to using this feature.
First things first...
Where Do Crypto Ads Come From?
Many users of free crypto sites are familiar with the concept of "PTC," in which a user is "Paid-to-Click" on a link to a page or site, where a few seconds of their attention earns them a couple sats, or whatever the currency of the site happens to be. Some of these ads are paid for by the creators or organizers of new projects to spread awareness, but the vast majority are sponsored by individual users of the platform, hoping to capture referral sign-ups for increased revenue on the platform they're advertising.
CoinPayU's PTC are called "ads" directly (instead of PTC), but the idea is the same:
- one user pays some crypto to CoinPayU (or whatever the platform is) to promote a link,
- another user receives some crypto for visiting the link,
- if the visitor signs up or performs certain actions at the link's destination, the user who paid for the ad benefits in some way.
There's no direct return on investment for this type of thing (meaning, if I pay 10 sats for an ad I'm not guaranteed to get 10 sats back), and the value is gained by however well your ad captures the attention of your audience.
Why would you do this?
Reasons differ for different people, but for me I'm most interested in growing my audience. I'm not looking for a direct return of sats, but rather to draw attention to my articles, both here and on Publish0x, where I first started writing about the Cryptoverse.
This is especially intriguing to me right now, because CoinPayU is having a couple recurring Article competitions (one for number of likes, one for content quality), and they have decreed that paying for clicks (but not likes directly) is okay. While ads won't guarantee that people will like what I write, the increased visibility increases the chances that I'll get likes or follows because of my writing style and quality content. I've personally opened an ad for the article that is holding the #1 spot of the Likes Campaign (as of this writing, by almost double the #2 spot) more than once, so it's pretty clear how that article got to the #1 spot. So I've decided to run a test to see whether advertising an article would be useful for me, either for competition purposes or just in general.
The Funding
I'm not a high roller. I don't have a bunch of liquid income to splash around on crypto-shenanigans like some of the people who are living on crypto do. In fact, the only kind of "roller" I am comes from my participation in RollerCoin, where I trade my time and energy playing minigames for a few fractional crypto-cents so I can buy some simulated mining equipment to hopefully earn a few additional fractional-crypto-cents.
Tldr version is that I don't buy crypto with my fiat (aka, real-life currency), I earn all my sats. This makes it all the more impactful when something can maximize (or wastes) my earnings. So for this experiment I funded my ad with sats I earned within the CoinPayU ecosystem, either from claiming the Faucet or from other people's Surf, Watch, Video, or Article ads.
The Process
Getting Ready: Funding For The Ad
You can't run an ad without paying for it, so the first step is to put sats in your CoinPayU "Purchase Balance." I chose to move sats from my account's "Main Balance" to the "Purchase Balance," but if you have other sats you can use the same deposit process I describe below. Moving from "Main" to "Purchase" is technically a withdrawal from "Main," so you'll need to have collected enough to meet the withdrawal minimum, which is currently 11,000 sats.
Pro Tip: if you have been collecting your allowed 4 faucets per day but don't have enough BTC sats in your "Main Balance," you can convert your other faucet currencies to BTC using the "Swap" feature, and then move them to your "Main Balance" using the "Transfer" feature. These actions are found on the Faucet page.
Moving Sats Into Your "Purchase Balance"
Find your deposit address by clicking on the "Deposit" button in the Purchase Balance section of your Dashboard page:
Make sure you have Bitcoin (BTC) selected, and copy the character string in the "Address" box:
It says minimum deposit is 0.0003BTC which is technically 30,000 sats, but I transferred 11,000 without problem. This may be different if your sats are coming from outside the CoinPayU system.
Then go back to your Dashboard and click "Withdraw."
Click the pencil in the address box to edit the address your withdrawals will go to, and paste in the Deposit address for your Purchase Balance:
There is a three day waiting period between changing your withdrawal address and making a withdrawal, and the system will automagically email you to notify you of the change. This is a safety measure so that if your account is hacked your sats cannot be withdrawn to an address that is not yours without your knowledge.
The minimum transfer-out amount is 11,000 sats, but the 200 sats transaction fee is the same for any size of transfer, so if you find you like doing this and are going to spend more on it, larger transfers are more cost-effective than more frequent ones. My 11,000 sats withdrawn was deposited as 10,800 sats.
Once your transfer-to account is set, make sure you have BTC selected and that your transfer amount is correct, and click "Confirm."
You'll get an email that the withdrawal has been initiated, and another one once your deposit has arrived.
IMPORTANT: Only transfer as BTC!
As far as I know, only BTC sats can be used to pay for ads, so make sure BTC (Bitcoin) is selected both when you're copying the address from your Purchase Balance Wallet and when you're pasting it into your Withdraw address. If you have another coin selected, that's like sending a text message to a land line -- it will never get there, and you'll lose those funds.
Setting Up The Ad
Once you have a Purchase Balance above zero, click on the "Advertise" button in the left hand menu.
Then click the big blue button that says "Create New Ads"
Different types of ads have different minimum funding requirements to run. I would think this indicates differing levels of effectiveness, but since I've only run one version I can't be sure of this.
Here are the minimum requirements:
- Surf Ads: pay 5.8 sats for 10 seconds of your ad being an open tab (perhaps a background tab). Minimum purchase: 2,000 clicks. Total Cost: 11,600 sats.
- Window Ads: pay 5.3 sats for 10 seconds of your ad being the active-tab. Minimum purchase of 2,000 clicks. Total Cost: 10,600 sats.
- Article Ads: pay 7.7 sats for each 15 seconds of active-tab article viewing. Minimum purchase: 1,000 clicks. Total Cost: 7,700 sats.
- Video Ads: this type is not available to me. Perhaps you have to be a premium or paid member of the site.
Because I am working with earned sats, I tend to be more conservative with them. Therefore, I only transferred the minimum amount required to transfer, leaving me only one option for ad type: Article Ads.
Even though I was advertising an Article article, at the time I was purchasing the ad the Article site was still in development, with some growing pains. Article Ads wasn't accessible using the "next" arrow at the top of the ads interface, so users had to know it existed and navigate there on purpose to even see Article ads. Also, I've noticed certain internet browsers will intermittently fail to track engagement with Article ads when the cookies/cache are not cleared. This meant my audience would be reduced to those motivated users who knew how to navigate the obstacles and weren't going to overlook this set of ads entirely.
I also adjusted the settings, which increased my ad's "CPC," or "cost per click:"
Requiring engagement meant that my visitors would have to click on a picture or link in my article in order to get their sats, potentially saving me some sats in the case of people just opening the article and not looking at it, or potentially increasing my chances of a referral if they clicked on one of the article's links.
Excluding VPN visitors means that someone can't get paid for my ad more than once by pretending to be someone else. If I had designated a certain part of the world to run or not run my ad (for example, if I was linking to something that wasn't available to people of a certain country), excluding VPN visitors reduces the chances of someone getting paid for viewing my ad with absolutely zero chance that I'd benefit from it.
The "Ads Rerun" option would give people a second chance to view my ad on a following day, so in case they wanted to follow through but for whatever reason didn't, they'd have a second chance. 1 Day was the only free option for this.
In total, this ad cost me 10,400 sats to run, with 1,000 clicks total and 10.4 sats per click.
This does NOT mean my visitors received 10.4 sats for clicking on my article; the preview below shows my visitors would receive 6.2 sats. The rest is divided according to the breakdown provided in CoinPayU's article, "The Future and Roadmap of Article."
"The House always wins."
If you haven't read the article I ran an ad for and want to, you can read it here.
How'd it Go?
The pocketful of sats I used to fund my ad is disappearing at a crazy rate! I started it at around ten after 3 (I'm not actually sure of the exact time, but it was shortly before 3:13). By 3:20 it had already been about 25% consumed.
After an hour it was 90% consumed.
And then it sat at 210 sats left for over an hour.
Overall, it took me about two weeks to build up that 11,000 sats by claiming the faucet and viewing other people's Surf/Watch/Video/Article ads, and the whole pile was gone by 5:25pm.
Two weeks' worth of earn, gone in under 2.5 hours.
Was it worth it?
Here's what I found after all the clicks were clicked:
At least 21 notifications on my Article account. Select an Image
In fact, it was an overwhelming amount of notifications:
(Remember, I'm small beans. I think before this I had like 12 notifications total.)
Attention was definitely drawn to the article I advertised:
Before this ad, that article had been published for two weeks and was viewed approximately 7 times. So not only did I get the 1,000 clicks I paid for, I got almost 28% more than that!
I also got some "likes":
Which puts me in the running for this competition!
If I hold 75th place for the rest of the week, I'll be awarded 3,000 sats for this article. And the visibility that comes from this article being on that list is probably where my extra views came from.
And Speaking of Visibility....
That article is at the top and center of the front page of the Article site!!! I feel so special. :D
Are Views or Likes Directly Profitable on Article Platform?
Honestly, I'm not sure how the mechanism for Article articles works. I don't know whether each view or like benefits me a certain number of sats, but here's what my Article "Payments" section shows:
I don't know whether "Paid Article" means I've paid some sats to Article, or if it's earned via paid articles, or something else?
I don't know how they come by these numbers, or how many have come from the article I advertised vs my other articles.
If I ever find out, maybe I'll update this section.
Does the Ad Type Matter?
I think the reason the Surf ads are more expensive is because that's where people who are looking to get sats for clicks start on CoinPayU. If your ad is the first thing they see when they open the "View Ads" menu, it's likely to get a lot more hits than one that is on the 5th page of the 3rd section.
BONUSES
I also gained followers. As of this writing, I have 74 followers, which means that whenever I publish new articles (like this one), those people will get a notification on their Article accounts, and they'll have a direct, personalized link to read my content. (Hi, followers!!) This also gives me a chance to read and interact with their content, as there is no centralized listing or Article's contributors or search feature to find people (or the tags they have us put on things we write). I hope I can get to the point where people who read my articles leave comments with real feedback or comments, and we can build something of a social collaborative atmosphere.
There was also some heightened interaction with my other (non-advertised) articles, which means that the one I advertised made an impression and people decided to read what else I've written. Exciting! :D
Also majorly important to me was that people enjoy the actual content of my article. I wrote it to help other crypto-earners find a good way to earn crypto, and its main purpose was to share the profitability of one of my favorite sites, Yannik.biz. At least 25 people signed up to Yannik.biz using my referral link from this article, which means it was worth writing. :)
Is the Ad-running process worth it?
In a word: completely. Even thought I spent 10,400 sats on it and can only identify getting ~3,500 back, begin able to connect with other people who enjoy my content will be more valuable in the long run, as I continue to develop my voice and find my writing topics.
Will I do it again? Absolutely. In fact, that just might be how you found this article.
Look out for that.
This article was originally posted to CoinPayU's "Article" writing platform.
Check out some of my other favorites and faucets for more ways to earn free stuff!
