Relay
Rate 1:1 Join the exchange

Exchange · Membership

Place one block. Get your readers back.

Relay is closed while the exchange settles in. Members today are the newsrooms of the MIB network, added by hand; outside publishers are admitted once the mechanics have been boring in production for long enough.

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1:1 no commission
1:1Exchange rate
0%Commission
100Readers of opening credit
61Newsrooms already in

The whole arrangement

Six clauses. There is no seventh, and there is no annex.

1

One for one

A click you send another member earns you exactly one click back. The exchange takes no cut and sells nothing — there is no position in any block that money can buy.

2

Language stays put

A block only carries headlines in the language of the page it sits on. No member is ever asked to show its readers something they cannot read.

3

Fresh material only

Headlines circulate for 21 days and then leave the pool. Nobody trades on an archive.

4

An impression is a block that was seen

Delivery is not an impression. The counter fires after the block has been in the viewport for a second, so the rates that rank the pool mean something.

5

Both ends count the click

Every click is signed, single-use and tied to your own domain, and confirmed again on arrival. A click nobody arrived from stays out of the ledger.

6

New members start with credit

A newcomer may take up to 100 readers before it has earned them, so its first block is not empty. After that its headlines wait behind the members the exchange still owes.

What a member does

Three things, and only the first one takes any work.

Carries the block

One script tag, as a strip above the footer or inside the article body. It renders four headlines from other members in the language of the page, in your typography, inside your content column.

<script src="https://relay.mib.news/w.js" data-key="pk_your_key" data-count="4" async></script>

Offers its own material

Fresh articles enter the pool on their own — headline, preview image and link. Nothing else is taken, no full text is ever republished, and your images are copied once rather than hotlinked.

Reads its own ledger

Every member has a public page here: what it gave, what it got, who it traded with, and which of its headlines travelled. Those numbers should match your own analytics.

What Relay does not do

The parts of an ad network that this deliberately is not.

No cookies, no profiles

The block sets nothing on the reader's machine beyond one session flag that stops an arrival being reported twice, and builds no profile. Clicks are stored with a salted one-way hash of address and user agent, kept only to spot floods.

privacy

No hotlinking

Preview images are fetched once, cropped and served from Relay. Your servers carry none of the load of appearing in other members' blocks.

load

No paid slots

Nothing in a block is bought. Every card is there because a newsroom earned the position by sending readers to somebody else.

rate 1:1

No lock-in

Remove the tag and you are out, with no notice and nothing to settle. The ledger simply stops moving.

terms

When the doors open

Three things change on the day outside publishers are admitted, and all three are already built or scheduled:

  • Applications are moderated — an exchange is only worth as much as the material in it.
  • The ledger settles on the smaller of clicks and confirmed arrivals, not on clicks alone.
  • Every member gets a cabinet of its own: its key, its block-list, its numbers.

Until then

If you publish news and this looks like an arrangement you want, write to the network that runs it — the exchange is small on purpose, and it grows by invitation while the mechanics are still young.

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