It's just over a year since we officially launched and the past 12 months have been a very bumpy ride. Over that time we've come to know 3 important things...

1. Changing the world is expensive.
For a project like this you need a huge amount of funding, a dedicated team, great hardware and a complete understanding of the banner advertising industry. It soon became clear we had none of these things and even though the site was making money our unique advertising model wasn't producing anything like the results we expected.

Soon we had dozens of support tickets from people who didn't understand why RefBan didn't work like other banner networks. We explained that we're different and that the majority of income wasn't generated by user banners, but by referral banners (as the name suggests). Still people didn't understand and they slowly stopped promoting us, reducing sales and daily impressions to the current level.

It became clear that without serious investment we'd never be able to teach everyone the benefits of our new model. Sales and impressions would continue to fall and we'd have to close the site. That's why over the next few weeks we'll be switching to a standard CPM model, just like every other network. It's a shame we have to abandon our original goals but when faced with financial reality, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

2. Nobody has their own website anymore.
A few years ago a new banner network would have no problem attracting thousands of users and generating revenue. The web is a very different place these days. We discovered to our cost that most web users now spend the majority of their time on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Rarely setting up their own blogs, websites or other places that could host our banners.

To combat this we created a way to generate revenue by sharing links, just like a URL shortener. Although as it worked with our 'complicated' model, we saw a massive increase in sales and impressions for a few weeks, then users once again abandoned it due to lack of understanding. For this reason we'll also be paying users a standard CPM rate for displaying banners on shared links.

3. We won't give up.
Over the last few months we have gone through no less than four programming agencies from all over the world. We've spent thousands of dollars, moved hosts multiple times and have dealt with dozens of people. Now we finally have the correct hardware and skills to push things forward, you can rest assured that we won't stop until we're successful. Many people in our situation would simply take the site offline. We've seen it time and time again, even with major companies. However, we believe that we have the start of something very special and with hard work RefBan can become much more than we ever hoped. All we need is a little time and patience.

Interesting..
Hopefully they will modify that sales rule or make it a bit easier to happen.. I have ~$60 there to cashout.. lol