Hey PeakD community we are running a test... we'd like to tell you about it because you may not even notice 👀
TL;DR
- This is just a test.
- Ads on PeakD.com for non-hive users may benefit the entire Hive Community.
- Incentives to bring lots eyes to your posts could help shift our posting culture and how users promote their content.
TESTING ADS
We're trying something new: experimenting with Google Ads on PeakD.com. Here's the deal: this is a test, and we're taking it slow. For now, logged-in users won't see any ads (meaning almost everyone reading this post won't actually see any ads) — we're only showing them to visitors who aren't logged in. We can get plenty of data from just those users alone.
We understand that after being ad-free for so many years, some of you might feel a bit unsure about this change and while this test won't directly impact logged in Hive users there will be indirect and positive ways to benefit all of Hive through this test.
SOME REASONS
- HIVE token buy pressure that could result could help Hive a lot.
- If this led to rewarding people for bringing eyeballs/visitors to their content that benefits all of Hive... specially if it led to less dependence and stress on reward pool funding.
- Hive has hundreds of thousands of posts and search engines push people to them on daily basis to no benefit of Hive
- Less impactful but this could lead to a reason to get an account. (A non ad experience if you get an account)
- Please share if you have reasons for or against.
"Is this something completely new?"
No. Other Hive blog sites and Hive video sites have experimented with ads to varying degrees. Recently we have had a substantial poll of hive users asked if they would want ads on Splinterlands.com (something the company didn't even request) and over 77% over users and 88% of staked tokens responded yes.
WAYS TO BENEFIT USERS
Part of this experiment is figuring out exactly how any revenue from ads will be used. In this first phase we are more interested in collecting data and all revenues generated from Ads will be used to buy back HIVE from the internal market and burn tokens (or send them to the DHF).
Based on the data collected during this test period these are some of the things we may consider going forward:
- Buying and burning HIVE to support the token's value.
- Create a profit sharing system for our community (e.g., rewarding those who help bring in views)
- Buying and staking (aka powering up) HIVE, which could mean more votes for our users and benefiting HIVE price
TEMPERED EXPECTATIONS
We still need to see how well ads perform it is not a given that it will have a substantial impact... things we have to consider:
- 65% of users use Chrome and a good proportion use Brave with a built in ad blocker and some use ad blockers on their other browser options.
- It's harder to put ads on Mobile... we have much less options for ad placement that is non-disruptive and 60%+ of our traffic is mobile.
- Well over 50% of traffic is from countries where ad revenue is significantly lower
The goal here is simple: this is not a get rich quick sort of thing ...if ads can create value, we want that value to benefit Hive Ecosystem, Individual Hive users and Hive communities in meaningful ways.
HOW TO VIEW OR SUPPORT ADS?
- Log out to see them
- Turn on this setting if you desire.
AD PLACEMENT
It's actually quite limited to begin with.
- Under Post Text
- Above Post Text
 |  |
- Also in the Search Section
(Which means we should probably work on the search page a bunch)
...Like we said it's starting off pretty limited.
WHAT'S NEXT
After we have collected a few weeks (maybe couple months) worth of data we'll share an update with users on some of the results and what we think will happen next. Some possibilities that we'll evaluate based on your feedback:
Revenues are small and not worth the time and effort and we could just stop the project
Ad Revenue is healthy, we may keep ads going and find ways to benefit all of Hive community (Buy Burn etc)
Revenues are better than expected and we build more tools to help bring in the community with sharing in revenue.
REMINDER: During this period all revenues generated from Ads will be used to purchase HIVE tokens and burn them from the internal market.
YOUR FEEDBACK
- Share how you would change your own promotion and marketing of YOUR posts or your communities content IF you knew getting more eyes on your content would lead towards profit sharing.
- Share if you know influential users that would bring viewership to a platform where they could get a profit for their views (many may already be on sites that offer this)
- Consider viewing PeakD.com not logged in or go to settings and turn them on and tell us what you think of ad placement and how you think we could improve it.
- Share creative ways you think we could benefit the greater hive ecosystem if the experiment does well.
We’d love your thoughts and feedback as we explore this. Let's make this work for all of us!
—The PeakD Team
Call to Action
Vote for our proposals here: https://peakd.com/me/proposals/peakd
Specifically this proposal is still not funded: https://peakd.com/me/proposals/311
The PeakD team
Published with PeakVault
This is absolutely phenomenal idea in my opinion. For logged in users no ads and for external users there are ads is a perfect way to run things.
If that gets combined with revenue increase for bloggers from bringing external eyes to Hive platfrom, then we could start seeing more and more amazing content pop up!
As long as logged in users don't see ads, this is my favorite idea for Hive blogging!
Keep up the great work PeakD team!!!
I'm not a big fan of ads on websites, but the idea of showing them to non-HIVE users isn't that bad at all...
I hope that the result will be positive! I would suggest maybe a bit different approach regarding revenue (if it's positive, of course)... I do understand that BUY demand could lower the selling pressure, but if the revenue is enough big, maybe it would be good to use it for future developments on Peakd and projects around it?
We need one good example that it is possible to build a business on HIVE and to be self-sustainable! Having PeakD as an example would be a HUGE thing! To pave the road for others!
All the best!
We should all be working on trying to bring outside income to hive and ad revenue is definitely one thing that is worth trying out. We tend to ignore that hive, because of the 7 day reward window, doesn't really offer incentives to promote content outside of hive and in the long run. If it would be possible to offer an incentive to bring more traffic to hive from outside, I believe that we would all profit from it. More traffic means better search engine ranking, more eyes and more interests for the platform in general. This in return might grow the ad revenue.
Thanks for your well reasoned feedback.
I always think that it is very important and necessary for a system to have a broad and stable hematopoietic function.
Displaying ads to non-registered users is a good balance between revenue generation and user experience.
I strongly support this test conducted by PeakD.com and wish you great success in your attempt.
Great idea and long overdue.
Hive needs urgently some revenue sources otherwise the selling pressure kills everything.
I support. You can also ask Hivers to have some minimum HivePower (1000HP, 2000HP or so) if they want to join the program.
👍
I may make some of my posts more SEO-optimized (few light-weighted images and SE-optimized text) to get some search engine / Gemini traffic.
However, I am skeptical about how much you can make with Google Adsense nowadays - not much. My last test was on Hubpages, my first and last article there got 350 views from Google search mostly and only 0.24$ (40% of the revenue, the rest went to Hubpages). So little. This article Koh Lipe on Budget in 2023. Ferries, Fees, Prices - unique text and images, no copy-paste.
But potentially big discussions of new things and last news in the Quora-like style can bring good traffic. Commentrewarder can help to create such discussions.
We are a bit skeptical about the earning potential as well because:
BUT... we'll see i guess.
24 cents for 350 views is actually pretty awesome if I understood your post correctly.
Quite realistic point of view.
Yes and no. If these 24 cents are passive income, then it's awesome. But from the point of the author, it's not much. Low-effort articles don't bring traffic anymore. Writing and SE-optimizing for several hours for 24 cents sucks. Hubpages takes 40% from their authors' earnings so they got 16 cents from my article to their piggy bank, it's not that bad. But they have a lot of ads on the page. They also allow authors to turn on Amazon links there to get more from articles.
We'll see. Because on Hive, Google ads revenue will be an addition to Hive rewards and this changes a lot.
I think the injection of text ads right in the middle of the text of the posts can be helpful. Drupal modules allow it, no idea about Peakd/Hive. You can inject a paragraph with an affiliate link or anything like that. Like, "Support the author and the platform by booking your next hotel with this link".
It's pity since Hive users aren't random like visitors from Google search but a group of people with a common interest in crypto / earning crypto.
You can consider showing something to users like a small line of text with some useful information. Although most Hivers aren't rich and not going to buy washing machines on Amazon but all want to raise crypto so an affiliate link to something useful can be popular. If this money is used to develop Hive blockchain, nobody will mind. This way, you can collect funds for some amazing competitions which would be interesting not only to Hivers. Millions of photographers are ready to join a contest with a decent photocamera as the main prize, for example. Ask them to have 10$-worth HP to be eligible for the contest, and they'll buy a lot of $HIVE.
Hivers can be interested in some crypto projects where they can earn. For example, I like beautiful NATIX app ("Join the world's largest AI camera network (DePIN) and earn"). Their referral links change every week but Peakd can ask them for a constant link - maybe, they'll agree. /No idea who is behind the project, just speaking about the surface/ Such cooperation with other crypto projects is good for Hive blockchain too.
Just some raw ideas out of loud.
I’m supportive of this test and that it will generate good results.
The good thing about it is that a user will have the option of viewing the ads whenever they wanted to. It’s a good that you prioritize the the experience of Hive users. Thanks
I turned on ADs for a couple of my accounts over in settings. I actually kind of don't notice them much. I use brave browser so i had to take down the ad shield as well. But also i'm not the primary audience because i can't remember the last time i clicked on an ad.
Certainly an idea worth trying.
I don't understand how it drives traffic to Hive but additional income sources are welcome as long as they don't impact the experience of account holders.
The idea is if users could see a personal or community reward to promoting their posts to people outside of Hive they would do it more. Do you think this will happen? Do we have the type of user base that is good at this? Maybe they've never had a big reason why non-users can't do reward-pool votes so maybe they've never cared before.
We are curious as well.
Personally I use Hive as the place I can write out my long form analysis and opinion for posterity and then circulate it to my friends, family and on X.
I also reference my old Hive posts on particular topics and send them to people I've been having a discussion about the topic with to provide the more in-depth treatment with references than can be done in conversation.
Honestly, I think it fine. On paper it provides a lot of benefits and I know for certain that hive posts rank highly on search engines so more eyes, more benefit and in the end it adds value to the system so, I think it's a fine idea
That is going to be beneficial for sure, it would be good to put the ads banner in the bottom, sides or in the mid of the post( just an opinion ). Great work 👍👏 thanks
Have you turned on ads in settings? If so feel free to send a screenshot and mark places you think they would be best. We would love it if multiple people did it so we could see what everyone thinks is best. Maybe we could do a poll.
I agree with this. I believe it will bring more eyes to hive. As a non-user, especially a Nigerian, it will certainly help to see hive advertised on Google and other interfaces.
Tell us more about how you believe people from your country will think about it.
This could indeed be profitable for Hive.
Do you explicitly mention this somewhere? That you get an experience without adds when you register an account?
Not yet as we just rolled out the test. BUT we can add it in a couple places for the non-user experience ... something like "Ad Free User account" "Ad Free for Users"??
But is the Ad Free account also for free?
yes, afaik peakd uses hiveonboard for acc creation which is supplied by ocdb account tickets for free.
altho glancing upon its wallet activity at this time tells me that is no longer the case: https://peakd.com/@hiveonboard/wallet
I would be in favour of buy and burn. It reduced supply and also to some extent inflation since percentage based inflation on a lower supply equals a small ammount of hive minted.
Could even do all the different benefit options, just allocate so much of the earning to each.
Its a bit more management overhead though.
I'm a hive witness supporting the blockchain please consider voting for me.
Thumbs up for having them only for non-users :) Like the idea!
Hi, @godfish,
This post has been voted on by @darkcloaks because you are an active member of the Darkcloaks gaming community.
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I don't like the ad being part of the post at the top. You could probably have it in the side bar in the left or right side.
From my experience, sidebar ads have almost zero click rate, the best performers are in the middle of the text.
Only clicks pay?
Yes, google pays only for clicks. There are other networks that pay for visits, but usually they are not worth the effort.
We for sure are very open to what placement will be best. Meaning what's worth it, what's going to be the least obtrusive. If ads don't get clicks then at some point it may be not worth having them, the juice may not be worth the squeeze as they say.
i've turned on ads for a couple weeks now during testing. I find that at some points google adsense even stops giving me the ads and the last one to go is the top of the post ad they seem to like that one.
I
Well it seems to be a good idea, best pilot test it before full roll out...
This is interesting, showing some ads to non-Hive users and using Google ads. I have some questions in terms of SEO and Google ads. We are aware that posts on all Hive-based blogs are similar to other websites, is it okay for Google, if you're using Google Ads?
Articles in PeakD are also visible to other websites, that could be the reasons why it is hard to compete in terms of search engine rankings because articles are similar on PeakD, Ecency and other websites using the Hive blockchain. Correct me if I'm wrong, I am just curious, thank you.
I'm not sure what you're asking. If it's part of their terms of service?
We didn't see anything regarding that.
Thank you for responding @jarvie. I don't have any idea if it's part of Google Ads terms of service, but for SEO perspective having duplicate contents or similar contents with other dApps on Hive is not good for search engine ranking.
A post on PeakD is also visible with Ecency and Hive.blog with similar contents, that is how Hive built with. For us Hive users it's common but I don't think it is good for Google's search ranking.
PeakD will never be affected because you're the top dapps on Hive but what will happen if the other dapps like Ecency or Hive.blog will also follow your footsteps adding Google ads. I don't know how will the search engine reactm but when you search on some keywords, it's hard to rank at the top spot of Google, if PeakD was already ranking.
This is just my personal thoughts on search engine rankings, it is very hard to rank Hive-related keywords on Google. I don't know if it's because of having duplicate contents across multiple Hive dapps or the search engine don't like to show similar contents across various Hive dapps.
This is what i mean in terms of search rankings. When i search for the article "testing ads on peakd" the results is not what I expected. The top article is from Hive.blog and the second article is from Peakd.com.
Google is really strange, it will not let duplicate contents to appear, although PeakD ranked second but they showed an old post, but the date of the results was updated. Anyway it's good for peakd because the ad placement is very visible but for new non-Hive users searching for keywords they will get confuse and they will never see the ads from peakd because they will probably click the first search results.
These things need to be done carefully. As I use Brave I will see less ads than others and I would rather not see them on Hive sites. I am still not against what you propose as it could bring in some income that could be used to benefit the platform. Use it as you see best.
We recognize a lot of our users probably use Brave (stats only say chrome so it's hard to know for sure) but ads don't go to users anyway so we'll see how much non-hive-users use something other than brave.
A very great approach it will be encouraging for users to get more eyes on thier post especially the ones that gave in much effort
How good at it do you think users will be?
Also how would YOU suggest users get more eyes on their posts?
On a more substantial note, I am not basically looking at the rewards it will give users in terms of upvotes and stuff. I am more focused on the impact. It will create more exposure to users or non users in terms of news and opportunities from different ads. Not to mention it can also convert non users into users.
But for users to gain more attention on their post they need to promote it to different social platforms web2 specifically, they can even try putting an ad on some free traffic site like trafficads with a mad call to action directing people in clicking on it which will bring them to hive
Also the position and location of the ads is in the right place either at the beginning of the post or the ending of the post and not in the middle though, because people tend to know how a story starts and how it ends. Sometimes they skip through to the ending part.
I fully support the inclusion of ADS on peakd, as long as they are not too invasive. Anything that absorbs HIVE from the market is positive for us. I propose to create a dedicated peakd curation account, where it will also be easier for users to view their earnings, with the promise that there will be no Unstaking on this dedicated account
Thanks for your feedback and support.
Also to be clear the ability to share with other users we still haven't decided how it would work so if you have thoughts please share. People need to generate quite a bit of views if they want it to mean anything. So we'll run the test and see if there are people who think they could get the views to make it worth working on this feature.
I'm not a big fan of ads, but we do need to start incentivising users to draw in eyes and attention to Hive. Short of a full rethink of the post reward and curation system, this is probably the best place to start.
With the Liotes project we plan to build an online course on Hive. This would cater mainly to people who don't have an account yet. So it would be great if it was possible to monetize this traffic in a way or an other.
yep. But just FYI ads require a lot of views to get the clicks to get the ad money. haha ... BUT... if you or others can get those views we would be happy to work on implementing that profit share feature.
I like when everyone gets a share ...
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Wait wht there's a Micro nation powered by hive. Why did this escape my attention...
Probably because we mainly speak french :) But we welcome everyone :-)
!PIZZA
Link me to this project. I'll join and get others on boarded too. Do we require a passport 🤔
Passport do exist indeed, the link is https://bastion.city, but the site needs to be redone, the only part of the site wher eI am active at the moment is the nft part : The wzllet : https://nft.bastion.city/Wallet2.html
and the market : https://nft.bastion.city/Market.html
As you see I am not a genius in designing :) Help would be appreciate on that specific point by the way.
But please tell me more about you, what's your interest in MicroNAtions ? :-)
Or do you have a discord ? or willing to join mine https://discord.bastion.city to talk about it ?
Thank you for your interest.
I think this is a great idea. We need ways to make Hive more valuable.
This is a great start. I would like that the HBD would be backed by other assets instead of Hive to create a more circular economy too.
Super valid idea! I believe this could have huge potential. Could I add one more option in the middle of this? Why not use the revenue from these ads to create ads about Hive/PeakD itself? I think there’s a lack of promotion about what’s happening here, and if it attracts more users, it could also be beneficial. Regarding buying tokens and burning them—great idea. Distributing part of it to those who stand out with posts that attract new visitors? Fair! I think this is an idea that should be considered across all the fronts we have here, as Hive is one entity. Kudos to everyone involved; I see a lot of promise in this!
I'm very happy to see this feature implemented on peakd and have turned on ads for my account straight away. Hopefully others do the same and we can see what revenue can be generated from the experiment. I'm hoping to see a post in a few weeks with results and to keep the community informed and involved in the process.
I know that it won't be huge to start with but the ads are non-intrusive and all users should turn them on to help the community. It would even be good for new account sign-ups to have to opt out rather than opt in as standard to help increase the views.
Small amounts add up very fast and if we can increase our pageviews in the next bull run those numbers could go up.
We all know from experience that the best form of advertising in crypto is price and if we can get more front ends earning revenue and buying hive from the markets it could create a positive effect on the price which in turn will bring in more users and encourage all of us to produce more front facing content.
If the ads did buy enough hive it would also be nice down the line to reward the content creators who are bringing in the most views and further incentivize quality content to keep increasing those numbers.
Even if the revenue is low to start i hope that the team keep going with the experiment for the foreseeable future until we can see if the community as a whole can work towards building out a library of SEO posts that will keep generating more and more revenue over time.
I'm 100% behind this proposal and have been asking for it with years. So happy to see the team taking a chance with ads and if it's successful we might see even more front ends doing the same and get more buy pressure on the hive markets. In the end it will benefit us all and give us more reason to buy hive ourselves if we know that there is a mechanism there to stop the constant sell pressure that we have seen over the past few years.
More active users and a higher price will totally change the view of our eco-system and encourage other devs to build their projects here if they can see that their investment will go up over time as well as the brilliant tech that is there for them to work with.
Thanks for this.
I like the idea of ads and so thank you for thinking about it and implementing this test. In my opinion every Hive front end should have ads to help Hive.
The ads mechanism would also incentivize hivers to promote their Hive posts outside of Hive and this could create a positive effect for the whole ecosystem.
I hope the test exceeds expectations and happens just that ->
Thank you for thinking of and testing new ideas for the good of Hive
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I fully agree with this proposal. Using those resources to buy HIVE on the domestic market and keeping it safe would benefit us greatly.
Advertising should be strategically placed so as not to interfere with the reading of our content and not scare away the reader.
I think it's a good move to at least try it out.
Hope that it generates a ton of revenue as well 👏
We share our PeakD posts on our website using picture and text links. This means that many of our website audience are mostly unregistered, so this approach will work well for us.
I like the idea that ad revenue is used to burn hive. Could become substantial if traffic increases.
I think this is an excellent idea, like you said, this is not a new idea to Hive.
This might help our Blockchain grow!👍
Ads for those who aren't signed in is a pretty good idea actually. If this place is bringing in traffic and people aren't signing up/aware, we may as well capitalise on it.
Would also help remove the pains of a 7 day curation window and keep "old" posts earning if they're picked up elsewhere. I'd be much more keen to post videos to Hive knowing I could earn from those months down the line, and be much happier putting that time and effort into creating video posts knowing this.
Amazing addition to Peakd and Hive as a whole! I turned the feature on only moments ago- and came to read the entire post, mid-read I realised I had adblock enabled so promptly disabled it for all things Peakd related, lo and behold upon a refresh I now see ads :)
subtly placed, no annoyance what so ever seeing these kinds of ads!
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I think this is certainly a worthwhile experiment. It's just a shame it's Google ads - perhaps we could tie in with Brave to show some of their ads (which are far less obtrusive) as an additional source of both ads and revenue.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of revenue split. Right now, I feel Hive is far too weighted towards giving revenue from the DHF to developers and the top 20 witnesses. If ad revenue was 50% burned and 50% given to authors and commenters (maybe only those comments upvoted by the authors of the post they're in), it could help rebalance things in favour of content creators.
yes if you have suggestions share links to ad systems that are not too complicated and would be better.
I think this makes a ton of sense, and incentivizes accounts! Can't say no to HIVE being bought either :)
I support this! 🔥🔥🔥
!BBH
@peakd! @bigtakosensei likes your content! so I just sent 1 BBH to your account on behalf of @bigtakosensei. (1/1)
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Biggest issue I have with this would be scam or phishing ads being shown and something that we can't moderate as it isn't our own ad network. Google is notoriously known for allowing scam ads on their network as we have seen previously. Even the FBI recommends using an adblocker for this very reason.
With that aside I don't see how this would bring in any new users. The previous blockchain did the exact thing (and subsequently on their own network) pre-Hive and all it did was to offset a small portion of their massive AWS bills.
I hate ads, but I'm turning them on for Hive - I want to have an actual opinion on how they look and feel. It totally makes sense and I respect that you're giving it a go to see what wethink.
I think this is a solid idea overall. It offers a lot of benefits on paper, and the increased visibility through search engines will bring more eyes to Hive, which ultimately adds value to the ecosystem. Displaying ads in different spots, like at the bottom, sides, or middle of posts, could also be a good approach for maximizing impact.
Additionally, I'm in favor of the "buy and burn" strategy, as it reduces the supply and helps control inflation by minting fewer HIVE tokens. We could even consider combining several benefit options by allocating specific portions of earnings to each, although that might require a bit more management. Great work—excited to see the impact! 👏
!PIZZA
I like this idea.
I don't think burning tokens is the best solution. I'd rather see the purchased Hive used to power up an account that upvotes quality posts. PeakD curation upvotes could receive a boost to incentivize more people to produce high-quality content that is actually worth the read. This boost would also enable widening the net and catching more deserving posts that otherwise would receive few or no rewards.
Better author rewards bring better authors and better content. If you reward pennies, you get content worth pennies in return.
I have been telling for a long time that we need to bring revenue form outside into HIVE: https://peakd.com/@vimukthi/hive-could-use-a-reader-focused-news-website-implementation-ideas-included--9f4
Even a small amount of revenue can go a long way when you are buying HIVE from the market. Please allocate part of the revenue to the content creators. Burning benefits everyone equally. It does not create an incentive for authors to work on their SEO or bring in readers from outside of HIVE.
I just saw the ad for the first time since I turned on the enable ads from the settings. I think that it's a good size, not too big but enough to catch the attention of the audience. I love the idea. Hope it works and generate a ton of ad revenue. The funds can be put to good use in development, marketing, burning Hive or distributing to authors / curators. Looking forward to see the data in the update a few months from now. Good job @peakd team. 😀