Five years of AdsWine

AdsWine has been monetising publishers' websites for five years. What began as a small, hands-on ad operation has grown — publisher by publisher, website by website — into an established advertising network serving 5,000+ publishers and 50M+ monthly organic visits across the world.

How it started

We started with a simple frustration: independent publishers were earning from networks they could not see into. Auctions happened somewhere else, numbers arrived without explanation, and support meant a ticket queue in another timezone. We believed a network could be run the other way — visible auctions, honest counting, and people who answer.

The years since

• Year one was a handful of publishers and a manual everything. It taught us the work: reviewing sites by hand, checking traffic, paying carefully.
• The middle years brought scale — the live server-side auction, proper measurement, and the finance discipline of an append-only ledger, so every cent a publisher earns can be traced to the impression that earned it.
• Most recently we opened the auction to every kind of demand — OpenRTB, Prebid and tag partners competing together — and rebuilt our publisher dashboard so every bid is visible live.

What five years changes

Experience in this business is mostly a list of mistakes you no longer make. Ours is written into the platform: no fake bids, no inflated counting, no payouts without review, no partner whose demand we cannot explain. Five years in, those rules are not policies on a page — they are how the system is built.