Microads #

The idea? To make marketing and advertising approachable for inde/solo developers so that when they have their own thing built and want to get some eyes on it - they can.

Why it makes sense? #

Because I for example have these ideas which I build functioning prototypes and MVPs for but have no idea what to do next or how. Many have this same problem.

You could try and advertise it somehow but if you haven’t got a sizeable fund already it doesn’t seem like it’ll get you anywhere.

Sidenote: I remember trying something ages ago and getting miserable conversion rates and concluding that if costs of advertising already look risky to you, spending even more might be worse than actual gambling

How it works #

You’re building a software product so you’re highly likely to have at least a website server running somewhere serving HTTPS, right?

So all you have to do is download (source and compile, if you want full control of code running on your machine(s)) a delivery-node (https://github.com/lukal-x/delivery-node) program which will (WIP https://github.com/lukal-x/delivery-node/issues/1) autoregister an advert from whatever you put in advert.txt file right next to it (format will be like 1st line is for the URL, 2nd line (first 200 characters) for the subtext) - if there’s an advert.txt file.

The delivery-node then just serves HTTP on a random port it finds available and autoregisters itself against https://microads.ftp.sh from which it will fetch a batch of ads to serve.

The whole point #

Your advert.txt is moderated then immediately served on the ad network for free through your own node. Because you yourself are serving the ad it doesn’t cost you a thing. There is a factor of randomness which will decide whether your node is picked to serve an ad someplace or not and then another if your node picks to serve your own ad or someone else’s (unless you change the delivery node’s code). When your node serves someone else’s ad you make money that you can claim on https://microads.ftp.sh by entering the HTTP server info and setting the special secret you get back as an ENV variable for your delivery-node to verify against the central server.

It’s been a while since I built this all up and IIRC besides the advert.txt part (you have to do it manually at the moment) everything else is implemented and is up and running. Payouts I think are supposed to be done manually also.

Why I wanted this #

is simple - I myself am the first customer for such a system. I have plenty of projects that could advertise one another and I can put advertising money into it little by little and allow other content publishers to earn it by showing my ads on their blogs/sites etc.