Ad Bard, A Drupal Powered Advertising Network

The Ad Bard Network is a LAMP-based advertising network built exclusively for free and open source projects. The goal is to build a friendly and useful advertising community that allows FOSS projects to earn income with relevant, non-obnoxious advertisements, staying in full control of all content served and all information collected. We are now actively seeking new Ad Bard members, offering a simple and free sign-up process starting here.

As a long-time Drupal-user, running KernelTrap.org with Drupal since February of 2002, I'm reaching out to the amazing Drupal community first. This is especially appropriate, as the Ad Bard Network is powered by Drupal and the Drupal Ad Module, the latter which I actively maintain within Drupal's contrib repository. Drupal is an excellent choice, as we're confident in it's ability to scale and perform.

The Infrastructure
We have optimized our infrastructure so advertisements are served extremely quickly, without slowing down your website. When you join our network, we provide you with a small, cacheable JavaScript that you install on all pages that you wish to display FOSS-oriented advertisements. The first time someone visits your web pages, this JavaScript is quickly loaded from a worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN). On subsequent page views by the same visitor, the JavaScript is quickly reloaded from their local web browser cache. The script sets up a small IFrame, allowing the rest of your webpage to continue loading.

At the same time, within the IFrame another JavaScript is executed directly from the Ad Bard Network, selecting an appropriate image for your website based on your custom configuration. This server-side process happens directly in RAM to ensure optimal performance. Finally, the selected advertisement image is loaded from our worldwide CDN partner, assuring that the actual image is quickly loaded from a caching server that is in close physical proximity to each of your visitors. All of this happens in milliseconds.

Statistics
The Drupal Advertisement module counts each and every time an advertisement is viewed, and tracks details about each time an advertisement is clicked. All information collected from your website is fully available to you through your Ad Bard user account. There are currently three views of this information.

The first is a simple overview, showing you how many hourly, daily, and monthly page views the Ad Bard Network has recorded for your website. This is the same information that is displayed about your website in the member directory. The second view offers historical page-view and ad-click graphs, offering hourly, daily, weekly and monthly granularity. The third view offers further detail about how many ads have been clicked on your website, where they have been clicked, and how much this has earned your project. In this view you can pull up additional detail about individual advertisement clicks. Duplicate clicks, clicks you make yourself, and clicks by search engine bots do not earn you anything, but they are also detailed for your review.

Earnings
Each time an advertisement is clicked on your web pages, you earn anywhere from 40% to 80% of the price per click of that advertisement. Our goal is to pass along as much of the earnings as we can to member websites, while continuing to grow and expand our network.

Configuration
The Ad Bard Network is an evolving project, with new features added every week. Among the available real-time configuration options, you can easily adjust from which advertisement categories ads should be selected for your website. You can also list all available ads within your selected categories, and manually disable any individual advertisements if for any reason you do not wish them to appear on your pages. Finally, there is an interface allowing you to upload your own custom images which can be displayed on your website when there are no paid advertisements available.

Advertising
Only static-image advertisements somehow related to free and open source software are allowed on the Ad Bard Network. Text-based advertisements will be introduced soon. Animated gifs, flash ads, popups, and other moving or otherwise distracting advertisements will not be offered at any time.

Ads are sold by the click, currently ranging from $0.20 to as low as $0.05 per click. Our current aim with this announcement is to attract more member websites, but if you're interested in advertising on the Ad Bard Network, follow this link.

The Future
We have many plans for new features to improve the Ad Bard Network in the upcoming months. It is an open source project that very much gains from comments, suggestions and feedback from you as a member of the free and open source community. Why not take a look right now, and join the existing Ad Bards helping to build this friendly and useful community.