Name: Ads, Classifieds, Promoted Posts

Related: Boosting Markets Bountied Questions

Goals

• Provide a small source of earning mana for poor users
• Help market creators get good bets and comments on their markets
• Provide a useful sink for mana for rich users

Pricing

Team Discussion February 22, 2023

• Charge users mana to promote a post
• Users can see the post as an ad and earn M.
• [s] why not start with promoting markets? Aren’t we deprecating posts?
  • [J] Because we want to see what use case users choose for ads. If they are mostly embedding like one market then we can make ads just be on markets
    • [s] but if posts are a bad experience today, then it’s not a good test of anything.
    • [c] I actually don’t think the editor experience is that bad. And the creation and discovery flow is going to be different. (You see one ad at a time)
  • [A] Possible things to promote:
    • Specific market
      • Pro: Keeps attention within Manifold site, narrower use cases might be good to start, focused on Boosting Markets
    • Post
      • Pro: Most like a classified ad, doesn’t require people to create a new market for something else
        • Market creators might not want poor traders to be betting on their markets
    • Arbitrary link (including off the site)
      • Pro: Most like fb/Google ads, most flexible
• [d] I don’t see how ads can actually be profitable for us if we pay users to watch them in mana (if we have manasinks that cost us real money, I guess rn we don’t tho lol). Most games can print infinite play-money with no cost to them or their user-economy.
  • [A] Just a question of pricing. eg could charge eg M100 to list an ad, and pay up to 10 users M5 for click-throughs.
    • [d] Okay this is true for inhouse ads, I guess I was starting to think more about external ads too which would have to be competitively priced.
• [D] Won’t we run out of ads to show users b/c not enough users will pay to show ads
  • [A] Could make it really easy to do an ad on a market
  • [D] Have to wait a few hours and come back to see the ads again
• [D] Ad could give about 10-20 mana

Initial discussion James <> Sinclair

Pricing

floating pricing based on queue length

start: 5 mana per ad view, → $50 cost per thousand impressions

assuming 1% click, cpc is $5