Gridcoin Advertising

In our last hangout, we briefly discussed the subject of Gridcoin advertising. I thought it might be a good idea to provide a detailed summary of the same, since many of our members aren't quite familiar with the topic and Foundation votes on advertising expenses always have low turnout.

Fixed campaigns

We can broadly divide our advertising efforts into two categories: Google Adwords campaigns and fixed campaigns. Fixed campaigns are simpler, so I'll explain them first.

Basically, in this type of advertising, we pay the website owner to display our banner for a fixed period of time, at a fixed price. Currently, only one such campaign is now active - on BOINC Combined Stats (often referred to as Netsoft).

Netsoft

We are paying for this campaign 50 USD per month, converted into Gridcoins (according to this calculator) and transferred to Netsoft Gridcoin address, displayed on their frontpage. This deal was approved through Foundation vote until 28 May 2017.  Gridcoin ad is visible on Netsoft even if you have Adblocker turned on and, with some tweaking, it's generally possible to avoid Adblocker in perpetuity, greatly increasing the number of impressions and the ultimate reach of this campaign. Also, our ad is getting displayed ALL the time - Netsoft is sometimes displaying other ads as well (general commercial stuff), but not in the top position which is reserved for our banner. Occasionally, banners are replaced with new ones, so that they remain noticeable and visually attractive.

BOINCstats

The most popular BOINC statistics webpage is BOINCstats which has approximately 10 times more visitors than Netsoft (about 350k per week). Purchasing a top banner there is of course much more expensive: 300€ per month (334 USD, according to present rates). We ran three fixed campaigns on boincstats so far - in November 2015, March 2016 and July 2016. First campaign was the most successful one and we've been hitting diminishing returns afterwards:

Same benefits apply as with any other fixed campaign: with some tweaking, it's generally possible to avoid Adblocker completely and our banner is displayed all the time. On such a popular website as boincstats,  the reach of such campaign can be ultimately huge. With allprojectstats and boincsynergy websites now gone, the popularity of boincstats is likely to increase even more, so we should probably consider running another fixed campaign there, sometime in the future. If we disregard the cost, boincstats campaign is probably the quickest way to boost recruitment rates.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is an entirely different beast and much more complex. It's an online advertising service from Google, expanding and adding new features continuously. Currently, we are spending up to 5 USD on AdWords (approved through Foundation vote), so I'll try to explain where and how is this money spent.

Display Network

Google AdWords campaigns can be further divided into two subcategories: Display Network and Search Network. Display Network consists of regular Internet sites which have an arrangement with Google to carry AdWords ads (like "Meet your Asian lady today"). When you hover with your mouse pointer over such ads, the link will often point to googleads.g.doubleclick.net or something similar - that's a Google AdWords advertisment on a Display Network site. Grossly oversimplified - you upload your banners to Google, select websites where you want them displayed, set your budget, enter your credit card details and you are ready to get advertised.

Boincstats and Free-DC (another popular BOINC statistics webpage, 150k impressions week) are also on Display Network, have an arrangement with Google and carry Google ads - among them are Gridcoin banners too. This is the actual screenshot of boincstats.com, taken few minutes ago. On top is regular commercial stuff, on right is Gridcoin ad, displayed through Google AdWords:

This is the actual screenshot of Free-DC:

Gridcoin banners are sometimes also displayed on some crypto-related websites like coinmarketcap, eobot, coinwarz, themerkle, 99bitcoins, cointasker, cryptoage, multipool.us, cryptomining-blog, cryptocoinsnews etc. Those websites (and plenty of others) are all on Display Network. Actual screenshot of coinmarketcap:

The cost of advertising on Display Network varies from site to site, however when you set your daily budget to 5 USD, Google takes care that you don't spend more than that. If your 5 USD gets spent by noon, they will simply stop displaying your ads for the remaining of the day. Of course, 5 USD is not very much, so you will not see Gridcoin banners very often on those sites. I have given priority to BOINC sites over crypto-sites, since BOINC users are most likely to get converted to Gridcoin.

Even if we spent more than 5 USD, there are always competing advertisers, so our display time is always limited. Additionally, Google AdWords is easily blocked by Adblocker - if you have Adblocker turned on, you will not see a single Google ad. Since Adblocker is getting more and more popular, the reach of Google AdWords is getting shorter and shorter. Google is of course aware of that, so they have another ace up their sleeves - Search Network.

Search Network

Search Network is in fact www.google.com. When you search on Google, you are often served some text-ads, usually associated with your search keywords. Those are also Google AdWords ads, but they cannot be filtered by Adblocker and are therefore more expensive. Type BOINC into Google and you might see a Gridcoin ad, most likely on the bottom of the second search page:

Of course, with higher bids and larger budget, our ad could appear every time someone searches for BOINC (since no one is really competing with us here). Also, the more you pay, the better position you get, so our ad could also get displayed very prominently at the top of the first search page, not on the bottom of the second page. Of course, we are not limited only to BOINC keyword - Gridcoin ads also appears from time to time for computing-related searches (like distributed computing, volunteer computing, network computing, grid computing, cloud computing, computing power, supercomputing etc). It also appears when someone searches for Seti at home, Primegrid, GPUGRID, Einstein at home, World Community Grid and other BOINC-related searches.

However, only "BOINC" keyword is let's say sufficiently covered with the present budget of 5 USD per day. We would need a much larger AdWords budget to efficiently cover everything else mentioned here, so other keywords are little more than experiments, for the time being. We often discuss the prospects of a commercial BOINC project, where a smart individual uses Gridcoin to acquire the substantial computing power of our  team. There is a slim possibility that such an individual might type "buy computing power" into his Google tomorrow. 

Anyway, as you can see, Google AdWords is a very powerful and versatile advertising tool and at this stage of Gridcoin development, it's hard to tell how much should we really spend on it. Personally, I think we should always maintain some advertising presence on popular BOINC websites like BOINCstats, Free-DC and Netsoft because that's where our future user base is. But everything else is completely open to discussion.

Looking forward to your suggestions,

Vortac