USFrequently Asked Questions
Common Business Questions
How do I get paid?
Our program is a 60/40 revenue share, where publishers get 40% of the gross revenue. Once your account reaches the $200 payout threshold payment will be made monthly within 60 days of your sign-up date.
Why do my solved TYPE-INs go up, but revenue does not?
The way that we compensate our Publishers is based on a rev share (60/40 ~ Solve Media/Publisher). The rev share is applicable when a correctly completed or solved TYPE-IN is submitted for an ad unit/revenue puzzle ONLY. Not every creative that we serve is revenue-bearing, and we can only share revenue for those that are. Our standard CAPTCHA-like puzzles do not contribute to your payout as they are meant to better secure a site while filling non-advertisement inventory. For security reasons, we cannot serve a revenue-bearing creative every time. Additionally, your site's categories may not fall into any of our advertisers' targets, or your users don't fall into any of our advertisers' demographic targets. Currently, most of our advertisers are targeting US traffic.
Do you offer an affiliate program?
We currently do not offer an affiliate program. Our standard program for Publishers is a revenue-share agreement.
What time zone are the reports based upon?
All the reports are in GMT.
Common Technical Questions
I want to use your system while developing our new website; how do I enable a test environment?
You can create a separate configuration for you test environment in the Solve Media portal, which will give you another set of API keys. You can set your preferences for that site to "security" instead of "revenue" to avoid receiving paid advertisements. When you are ready to deploy the changes to production, simply replace the test environment API keys with the production API keys.
How do I set the variables adcopy_response and adcopy_challenge?
The adcopy_challenge and adcopy_response input elements are created by the javascript code that is requested from our servers.
Why am I unable to complete the puzzles and see a 'banned ip' error?
This error typically occurs when the IP address that is being passed during the verification step is not the user's IP. When a request comes in from the user's browser (on your site) to our systems for a Solve Media Puzzle, we log the IP address of that challenge request. Subsequently, when you validate that particular challenge, you also send us the same end user's IP. In this way we confirm that the person answering the puzzle is the same person requesting it. What we're seeing from your servers however is the following: lots of various IPs making the challenge request, and only a small set of IPs being used over and over on the verification step.
To our reputation management system, it looks like someone is trying to break into your site by bypassing our security, perhaps by outsourcing CAPTCHA solving to a 3rd party. However, this is often caused by a reverse proxy.
Why am I getting a "could not open socket" error?
The error that you are seeing means that your webserver is unable to establish a connection with our servers.
First, try pinging verify.solvemedia.com from your server. Your server must be able to communicate with servers associated with that address. If pinging fails, check your server settings (firewall, etc.) to make sure that connections to verify.solvemedia.com are not being blocked.
Some web hosting services have policies that restrict outbound requests on port 80, which our PHP library currently requires. Your hosting service's policy and restrictions are entirely up to them and beyond our control. We will continue to explore other implementation options, but for now you have to resolve the issue with your hosting service.
If your hosting service does not block requests on port 80 and all your settings are correct, but the problem persists, submit a trouble ticket.
What is a "ckey / domain mismatch" error?
A "ckey / domain mismatch" message appears when the domain of your page, and/or the challenge (public) key you are using do not exactly match the settings in the Solve Media portal.
Open "My Sites - Configure" and verify that the value in the Site field matches the domain of the page where you implemented the widget. If the address of your page is http://blog.mywebsite.com/page1.html then the Site field should read blog.mywebsite.com, and not www.mywebsite.com or Blog.MyWebsite.Com.
Confirm that you correctly copied the challenge key. If you added the HTML code yourself, make sure that you replaced <your_challenge_key> with your challenge key.
I cannot find a developer API or plugin that supports my site, what should I do?
If you need help implementing the widget on your site, please submit a trouble ticket.
I have multiple sites under the same domain, do I have to create a separate set of API keys for each one?
You can use the same set of API keys for all sites under the same domain. Open "My Sites - Configure" and set the value in the Site field to a dot followed by your domain. If your websites are blog.mywebsite.com and forum.mywebsite.com then set the value in the Site field to .mywebsite.com.
How do I use different security settings on different pages of my site?
You can create multiple sets of API keys for the same site. Open "My Sites - Configure" and create a new set of API keys. Use the set of API keys that corresponds to your desired security setting on the various pages.
