I run websites. At some point I wanted to buy advertising that reached crypto users, which sounds like a solved problem in a category that has existed for a decade. It is not a solved problem. It is a category that has quietly agreed to make itself hard to enter.
The pattern repeats across every network I looked at. Pricing is behind a form. The minimum is four figures, or three figures plus a daily floor that turns it into four. Verification takes a week and asks for documents nobody explains the use of. Some networks will happily sell you traffic that no analytics tool can distinguish from a datacentre. And the reporting is a dashboard the vendor controls end to end: their counter, their numbers, their word.
The publisher side is worse in a more specific way. Nobody publishes the revenue share. You are told the split when you apply, or you are told a range, or you are told nothing and find out from a payment. Payout minimums sit high enough that a small site can earn for months without ever being paid. Applications get rejected without a reason, which makes the rejection impossible to act on.
What we decided instead
PraxAds is a managed marketplace. In this phase a human — me, with a lot of machine help — reads every publisher application, matches every campaign by hand, and writes every media plan. That is slower than an auction and, at this size, considerably better than one, because an auction over inventory nobody inspected is how the traffic quality problem got here in the first place.
The part that matters is not the matching, though. It is that everything the vendor usually keeps is published:
- The rate card is a page, not a conversation. Same prices at $100 as at fifty times that.
- The revenue share is printed — 80% to publishers for the founding cohort, 75% standard after it, and the standard rate is already in the Terms today so nobody can later claim it was sprung on them.
- Payouts are on-chain, NET-15, minimum $25. A publisher can verify the split against a public ledger instead of trusting my arithmetic.
- The measurement gap is published in advance. Our count and a publisher's count disagree, always, and we show both columns and bill on the smaller one.
- Rejections come with reasons, and the aggregate goes in the monthly report. So does one thing we got wrong that month.
What I am not claiming
That this is bigger than it is. The network is small and the section that says so is on the network page with no reach figure attached, because I do not have one worth publishing yet. When I do, it will come from measured data in a transparency report, not from a slide.
That we are better at everything. We are not. Other networks have distribution and relationships built over years, and there are things they do that we cannot do at all yet. Where we compare ourselves to them in writing, the comparison names what they do better, or it does not get published.
That transparency is a moat forever. It is a moat right now because the incumbents structurally cannot copy it — publishing the split invites every existing publisher to ask why theirs is lower. That will not last. By the time it stops working, the product underneath has to be good enough to stand on its own.
The deal
Send a brief. You get a written plan back within 48 hours with real placement names and a price on every line. If the honest answer is that we do not have inventory that fits, you get that answer instead of a proposal.
Then check our numbers against your own analytics, and tell me where they disagree. I would rather have that argument than not have it.
— Austin
Founder, PraxAds