Backfill
Your own ads, in your own slots, counted honestly.
Small publishers have a quiet problem: the ad slots on their sites are worth more filled with their own links — affiliate offers, sister sites, a support page — than with anything the low-tier ad networks will pay, which is close to nothing. But rotating those links and counting what they earn usually means either a heavyweight ad server or nothing. Backfill is the small tool in between: a house-ads manager that rotates your campaigns by weight and counts impressions and clicks, with no cookies and no tracking.
How it works
- Declare slots. A page marks its ad positions with a plain div — <div data-bf-slot="top" data-bf-size="leaderboard"> — and loads one small script.
- Define campaigns. Each campaign is a destination link, a creative (an image, or a small HTML snippet), a weight, and optionally dates, a daily impression cap, and a restriction to particular sites.
- Rotate and count. The service picks a campaign per request by weighted rotation, counts the impression, and routes clicks through a redirect so the clicks counted are clicks that happened. Crawler and bot traffic is filtered out of the counts — on real sites most raw "traffic" is machines, and numbers that include them are fiction.
Principles
- Cookieless. No cookies are set or read, nothing is stored on a visitor's device, and nobody is fingerprinted. The service keeps counts — impressions, clicks, per campaign, per slot, per day — and nothing else.
- Clean inventory. Banners and links only. No popunders, no push notifications, no adult category.
- Failure is quiet. If the service is unreachable, slots simply stay empty (or keep whatever static fallback the page put there). A house-ads tool should never be the thing that breaks a page.
Status
Backfill is in development. Stage 1 is a single-operator tool: it runs the house ads on its operator's own websites, and that is the whole of it for now. Opening it to outside publishers — and the obligations that come with handling other people's money — is a separate, later decision, and has not been made.
There is a working demonstration on this server: the demo page carries three live slots fed by sample campaigns.
Backfill is in development. It serves the operator's own house ads; it is not an ad network, sells no advertising, and holds no one's money.