Wow, good job @Mira. What was your strategy here?

@IsaacKing I had an intuitive estimate in mind from occasionally clicking through to the ads and seeing the same ads over and over:

• I saw the amount of mana remaining on one of the Manifold dev ads, and that let me estimate maximum users.

• Then I multiply by "about how many times did I click on an ad as a 80th percentile heavy user?"

• Then I multiply by "What's the 10th percentile, 90th percentile estimate difference for how frequently someone probably browses through ads?"

• Then I sum ~M5k at most for the testing everyone did when ads were first released, estimated from the number of markets and discord conversations about them * M500 at most for testing.

• Then I compare with, "When I purchased M500 of ads, what was my net return?" it came out negative at M10, positive on a big grid of markets at M5, so I had a sense of how likely people were to reinvest into ads, which directly lets you estimate total mana that people would be willing to spend. (It's close to 1:1 return when averaged over everyone, so market was not obviously YES or obviously NO, hence the estimates from user frequency for more precision)

And I had plenty of margin to bid it up. Not so much margin to make a massive bet, but enough to bid up to 40% and collect the easy money.

I remember my mental estimate being M45k or so, so I undershot by 25%. But that's why you build in margin on approximate estimates like these.

I didn't spend that much time on it, but you get a sense for these things if you use them.

Theoretically, I could've gone into the posts and counted the mana on every ad in there to get an absolute answer. But my actual method was to estimate it from average rates that mana in the ads that I saw was going down from my memory, with the obvious adjustment factors like the above(but applied intuitively rather than as an explicit list or calculation).

No, only 56,140 mana was spent before April 1.

We have since hit 72,170 mana though, so we got over the magic number at some point

@Sinclair Wow! That's more demand than I expected.

Any stat update?

requires a supabase query which I'll try to do on monday

@Sinclair do you have an update now?

A few things that could make ads better:

1. Don’t display ads for which users can’t claim the reward (because they’ve already seen them)

2. Make it easier to vote on all types of questions in the ads page (ie, without having to click on the market)

How much has been spent so far?

Is Mana „spent“ when ads are created or only when viewed?

@MaxPayne when created

Really love Manifold ads. Makes the mana economy so real. And it's fun!

We should promote this feature by linking to it somewhere more prominent (not just from the sitemap).