Adpinion is an advertising network based on a new method of targeting ads.

We place a thumbs up and a thumbs down button on every ad we serve. A thumbs up says an ad is OK, and a thumbs down gets rid of it.

For each person, we can use that feedback to learn what they like and dislike, and only show ads that they're likely to be interested in.

Why are ads the only things on the internet that you can't control? We set out to change that. The increasingly prevalent use of ad blockers means something: people are tired of having no recourse for annoying advertisements. Adpinion lets our users tell us how to target their ads, and we get rid of any ad a user dislikes immediately.

Why are nearly all ad networks trying to deliver websites? Aren't ads for people? We give advertisers people, not proxies. Trying to guess what a person likes by watching what sites they visit isn't crazy, but it's a lot less direct than just asking them! We just ask them.

There's enough proof to show that collecting volumes of personal information about internet users isn't safe. The only way to protect users is to not collect that data in the first place -- so we don't.

We never understood why we had to visit a music equipment site to see ads for music equipment. Wouldn't it make more sense to show products and services that you're not already being bombarded with by the website you're on?

1. Adpinion uses the feedback data that we collect through the thumb buttons to clump ads together.

2. Using that concept over time, we create clumps of advertisements.

3. Each person's feedback lets us know which clumps of ads they like; we show them other ads from those clumps.

4. If we don't know anything about the person, we can make a best guess based on what website, time or geographic location.

For example: if most people in San Francisco at 6pm visiting Epicurious.com liked ads for cookware, we'll show new people that.

Adpinion is a Cost-Per-Click market. Advertisers control the cost of each click by setting a bid for their ad. We choose which ad to show a user with a simple formula: the bid from an advertiser multiplied by the "relevance score" of the ad for a particular user.

The relevance score is the likelyhood of that user being interested in the ad, based on their previous reactions to ads.

Since we give advertisers complete control over their bid, it is possible to overcome a low relevance score by bidding more for the click. But we suspect it will be cheaper to just make more ads, to appeal to more types of people: the more relevant you can make your ads, the cheaper they'll be. We provide ways to split your budget among many ads to make the most of that fact.

Advertisers can do some really cool stuff with the feedback from Adpinion.

Instead of just making one kind of ad, and trying to guess which web sites it will work best on...

Adpinion lets you make as many ads as you can think of.

Throw them into Adpinion, and it will automatically find the best audience for each of them. Why show the same ad to everyone? It would be best if you could have a different ad for every type of person. Adpinion lets you do exactly that!

Publishers get the great benefit of showing relevant ads to their users. This naturally leads to increased click-through-rate, but it also keeps you from turning away users with ads that just don't make sense for them.

Plus, when a user doesn't like an ad that's showing on your page, they can click the thumbs down to make it disappear immediately instead of using an ad blocker. Adpinion can also pass along its knowledge of your userbase's favorite ads to you, so you can better understand your audience.

Irrelevant ads are annoying. With Adpinion, if an ad is really bugging you, you can click the thumbs down and it disappears instantly. And it also tells Adpinion that this is not what you're interested in: you won't see the ad again (at least, it's highly unlikely).

We don't think ads have to be annoying. If they're for things you're interested in, they can be useful; more like a product recommendation system.

We also made Adpinion completely anonymized - we can give you better ads without compromising your privacy.

Adpinion was designed from the start to protect the anonymity of all its users. By using an anonymous key stored on your personal computer, we can learn what you like without learning who you are. And with our unique key retrieval system, you can even carry your preferences across machines (or after you clear your cookies) while retaining that same anonymity.

Today, companies try to gather as much information about, well, /everyone/ as they can. We decided to set a precedent by collecting as little as we possibly can. We could log your IP address* every time you see an Adpinion ad, but we don't! We could also keep track of what websites you visit, but we don't do that either. In fact, we don't need to do that type of thing at all: Adpinion is the first entirely opt-in advertising network.

*Which, with a quick call to your ISP (if they're weak or unscrupulous) will give us your name, number and address!