Quote:
Originally Posted by AndrewJackson
There have been a lot of changes to Pinion recently. Most seem positive but when compared to the Pinion we've come to know I think there are some questions to be had. Arthur, please don't take these questions the wrong but I hope you can take the time at some point to answer them in detail so the community can know what to expect from you going forward.
1. Can we get an official word on whether or not we are required to use the plugin?
We don't need to know about the increased revenue when using it, those are just your selling points. Reality is it's extremely bloated, has clearly undesirable features, and simply isn't for everyone. So all that stuff aside... can we serve ads without it, without getting emails from Pinion days before payday questioning us and/or not paying us, without getting throttled, and without the constant Click To Play ads (please no selling points on this nonsense, we are simply losing money)?
To add on to this, if the answer is: yes we must use your plugin - Can you give us legitimate reasons besides your selling points on how it's valuable for our clients? How is it valuable to us, the owners trying to afford our services? There are 4-5 other MOTD ad companies available. None of them require the use of their plugin, have equal to or greater CPM and Fill as Pinion, and don't limit your ads/revenue because of it.
2. Gambling spam. Okay we get it, Pinion is Unikrn and Unikrn is eSports gambling. We get that you're putting in thousands of dollars per month into giveaways.
What I think you don't get, is that children 13 and over are playing on our community servers (probably younger as well, but 13 for the sake of Steam ToS). Literally every single time an ad is either finished or doesn't show, our players are redirected to Unikrn Coins page. You are forcing gambling on every person that our MOTD is shown to. Then you guys have the nerve to put the wording "Unikrn has partnered with this server to offer you daily rewards". No, no we did not. We partnered with you to serve ads to help support the communities WE WORK FOR. You already take a generous cut of the profits. On top of that you are now taking full control of our MOTD and redirecting ALL of our players to your gambling site. That's what Unikrn coins are for, gambling.
Why is this happening? Who is the genius that thinks it's okay to not only take a considerable cut of our profits while limiting our earnings with plugins/click to play ads/gimmicks BUT THEN forwards those clients to your gambling site? Do your advertising partners know that you are directing underage kids to a full on gambling site, regardless of what Unikrn's ToS says about who and who can't use the service? I know online gambling is illegal in the United States and while skins are currently a gray area....this is not cool and I would like to see answers as to the logic and reasoning behind it.
3. Why are there so many click to play ads? Skip the nonsense about user interaction with the MOTD. They came to my server to play the gamemode I'm offering. The fact they are even hanging out at the MOTD long enough to view an ad is a miracle, now you're forcing them to click it if I wanna earn anything? How much more are you paying for these Click to Play ads, 25-50 cents? Certainly not even close to enough to make up for all the lost impressions and certainly no where near the STANDARD CPM offered by all of your competition.
4. Why has clicking ads become incentivized? If I've learned one thing while serving ads in the past 10 years it's that clicking ads can lead to trouble with advertisers and end up with lost earnings. Why is it now the standard for your company to pay based on clicks?
5. Lastly can we please get a real response regarding Pinion's future without Liverail? You guys were getting the majority if not all of your ads through their marketplace. You were also using their ad server. While a new ad server is easy to come by, ad partners are not. Facebook isn't accepting but a small percent back into the new private marketplace. How do you guys plan to secure your future (and our earnings potential with you) going forward, as this news wasn't something that has been out for long enough to give you months of advanced warning? This was dropped on clients within the past few weeks and it's set to take effect at the end of next month if memory serves me.
Sorry for the length and the directness but Pinion is a big player in the ad game and a lot of communities are getting screwed up with the changes and serious lack of information.
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Not a problem, happy to answer.
1. The plugin does help with fraud as it sends back lots of information that we use and the control panel relies on having to give you the full breakdown of stats by server, earnings by server and all the other cool advanced metrics we now show.
Technically speaking it isn't required to serve adverts, but it's something we require. Currently we have a build of a light plugin which does nothing beyond the above. If that's something you're interested in please email or PM me.
2. Unikrn as a platform is legal globally, it's split down between rest of world and real money regions.
In regions where we're licenced it's 18+ with full identity verification required (passport, licence, healthcare, mailing address etc). Other regions that fall into rest of world it's purely a token based system with no actual money or skin economy.
This system isn't taking any profits, our first priority on Pinion is to monetize traffic, the logic currently is
- If an advert is served, after redirect to PoG
- If no advert is served (through our waterfall,all ad sources), offer PoG instead
There's a newsletter coming next week which should give some more insight.
3. There shouldn't be any click to play ads, they should always autoplay. Can you PM me your details (which country you're in, what the ads actually are) I'll reach out to advertisers and get them removed as it's not our model. We bill purely on CPM with some bonuses (see point 4).
4. It's just a bonus for communities with higher clickthrough metrics, we decided to reward communities with higher quality traffic. This will be exposed in CP in the next update, just by showing current MTD CTR and the bonus teirs.
The backend logic is built and functional, some communities received 10-20% bonuses overall on top of their invoice.
5. This really isn't a factor in anyway shape or form,
we purely use it as an ad server, aside from that we don't rely on Liverail Central / Marketplace at all. We work closely with our advertisers and bring them over from Unikrn to Pinion and visa versa. As for notice, we've been with Liverail from the very beginning so we've known since Q4 last year. Unikrn itself also has a good relationship with Facebook so this isn't really a factor.
If anything earnings might go up as some ad servers have a higher error rate with Liverail connections. We're using this as an opportunity to build some kickarse cutting edge tech to improve fill, reduce latency and optimize everything.
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