In our ongoing quest to bring a diversity of ad networks to our users we got to sit down with Tomasz Kleko the owner of PopAds. We asked Tomasz our core questions and got some great feedback.
How did PopAds get started in the industry?
I’ve been doing smaller Internet businesses since my early teens, then I tried doing a CPM ad network with moderate success, however it had too many, let’s call them, “design flaws” and despite it being profitable, I decided to close it.
By that time, PopAds was already open. It was created as a fully self serve ad network with the idea of being easy to use and just friendly. No strict rules, no months of waiting for payments, no hours of waiting for stats updates. Everything fast, realtime, just when you need it. Back then, I think we were the only network that was doing daily payments and publishers loved it.
What features make PopAds unique?
We offer loads of targeting options, I guess more than our competitors. We have loads of proprietary technology. For example, our system for translating user agents into device/browser/os that I believe works much better than other commercial solutions.
Apart from that, we have many anti-fraud filters built into our adserving system, all designed and coded by me. Even after 5 years of operations, some of them are still fairly cutting edge like passive user agent spoofing detection. We also maintain our own database of VPN/proxy IPs.
Right now I am working on a side project that will focus on online advertising fraud detection/filtering as a service and of course it will be integrated into PopAds.
Who should advertise with PopAds?
I am not really a sales person (which means we don’t have a single one at PopAds 🙂 ) so I am not going to say “anyone”. We want to have happy customers, not just customers. If you want to advertise your flowers shop than PopAds is definitely not the place. Some examples of our advertisers are; casinos, binary options, ad arbitrage, etc.
How large is the PopAds network?
Right now we serve about 90-100,000 popunders per day, tens of thousands of publishers and about 8,000 active campaigns.
What statistics are PopAds looking for in a publisher?
We are not looking for anything to be honest. If you have 100 visitors a day or 10 million, we don’t really care. In all situations we try to provide the best possible revenue and service.
What new features are PopAds working on?
We are expanding our campaign scanner to be more efficient at detecting bad ads like tech support blockers, chrome extension forcers and malware.
We also might have a new kind of ad type, not present anywhere in the industry at this moment. I’m not ready to reveal details at this time.
From an advertiser point of view, as I mentioned, we will be expanding fraud filtering to a fairly paranoid level, once my side project is closer to being ready.
Is there anything else we should know about PopAds?
In the coming months, we will be starting an informative campaign about Google Chrome’s “intrusive ads” adblock issue. It will be focusing on explaining both to webmasters and visitors why it’s not a good thing and should be opposed.
I personally believe, that if the adblock in Chrome works well enough, it will endanger the existence of many websites which have high costs (video streaming, file hosting etc.) and are unable to use Adsense due to compliance reasons.
I know that most people will be happy with ads removed, but it’s like being happy that the government said that now all items in grocery shops are free. Well, that’s amazingly cool… until all the grocery stores close after all items are taken and not restocked.