Not more than 3 hours after we launched the ad network Lenn emailed us saying, in effect: if I create 50 campaigns and have to charge my card 50 times the bank will disable it for fraud. Very good point, so we rewrote the financial end of the ad network yesterday.
You now have a Bank which you can use to fund all of your campaigns. Just like a normal bank you can move money in and out of your bank to and from campaigns. You'll notice a My Bank link at the top of the screen when you login to http://ads.activerain.com
The new Bank concept also has an advantage: you no longer need to fund each ad campaign with $10... the budget for an an ad campaign can be as small or large as you want it to be now.
With the new bank concept Jon thought it'd be smart to allow your ad campaigns to auto-deduct from your bank instead of forcing you to set an ad campaign budget. So - this is enabled in the budgeting step when creating/editing an ad campaign.
We've started to ad some stats that you'll see when you login to http://ads.activerain.com as well. We'll be adding more stats in the near future to help users fine tune their ad campaigns.
Bug Notice: There was a major bug in targeting anything other than "All Pages" (thanks Bob for finding this!). Unfortunately we couldn't fix this and preserve the settings you had so we had to delete all targets that weren't All Pages. So - if you tried to set up targeting to specific pages you'll need to redo those targets. Sorry about that!
Formating: We're still trying to get the formating right for ads... so we'll be tweaking this often over the next few days.
Documentation: We're going to try to do extensive documentation on the ad system (hopefully today). We realize it's kind of confusing and are working to make it better.
Localism advertising: We're hoping to get ads running on Localism very soon, it's in the pipeline.
The comments we've been receiving from users have been very helpful... please continue to alert of us of concerns, confusions and especially bugs.
-ben
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