Monetization

Overview

Monetization lets you earn from the schedules on your instance that are not paying you. It has two independent halves, and you can run either one on its own:

• Google AdSense. Ad units on free schedules' public pages, using your own AdSense account.
• The promotions network. Paid schedules buy placement for their events on free schedules' pages. You set the price and keep all of it.

Paid schedules never carry either, so removing ads becomes a concrete reason for your customers to upgrade, alongside removing the footer strip that promotes your own marketing site to their visitors.

A third earner, the accommodation affiliate, is documented on this page but is a separate feature with its own switch:

Consent and privacy

Google provides a free CMP. Enable the GDPR message under Privacy & messaging in your AdSense account; it needs no changes here. Once AdSense is fully configured, this application's content security policy automatically allows Google's ad and consent domains, so no header changes are needed either.

Event Schedule defaults to non-personalized ads, which is the safer setting and the one that requires the least of you. The Allow personalized ads toggle in the Monetization card is off until you turn it on, and doing so is your decision and your legal responsibility. The app also always honours a visitor's Sec-GPC (Global Privacy Control) header by forcing non-personalized ads for that request, whatever the setting says.

Two more things are yours to handle: enabling AdSense means your visitors' browsers contact Google, so your privacy policy and cookie notice have to say so; and your AdSense account standing is between you and Google. Do not click your own ads, and do not ask anyone else to.

The promotions network has none of these obligations. It is served entirely by your own install, sets no third-party cookies, and makes no external requests. When a promotion fills the slot, the page contacts Google not at all, because the AdSense script is loaded by the ad unit itself rather than from the page head.

The accommodation affiliate is a third case. It does involve a third party that sets its own cookies, so the same disclosure obligation applies, but it is never loaded on page load. A visitor who has not accepted cookies sees an explanation and a button, and nothing reaches Stay22 until they click it.

Turning it on

1. Set ADS_ENABLED=true in your .env and deploy. This is a deliberate deploy-time gate: it cannot be switched on from the admin panel, so a misclick can never start serving ads across your whole instance.
2. Sign in as an administrator and open Admin → Settings. A Monetization card appears once the gate above is on.
3. Configure whichever half you want, and save. The card writes to the settings table, so these values take effect immediately with no redeploy.
4. Confirm your cron entry is running. Promotions are settled, reconciled and refunded by a scheduled command that runs every fifteen minutes, so without * * * * * php artisan schedule:run campaigns never complete and unspent budget is never returned.

Google AdSense

1. Create an AdSense account and add your instance's domain as a site.
2. Create a display ad unit. Note its numeric slot ID.
3. In Admin → Settings → Monetization, switch on Show Google AdSense on free schedules and fill in AdSense publisher ID (ca-pub-…) and AdSense ad slot ID.

All three are required. The toggle on its own does nothing, and neither does a publisher ID without a slot ID, so a half-finished setup is inert rather than broken: no script is loaded, and the content security policy is not widened.

The label above the unit reads "Advertisement", which is one of the two wordings AdSense policy permits next to a unit. When AdSense has nothing to serve it marks the unit as unfilled and the whole block collapses, so an empty band is never left behind.

The promotions network

Switch on Enable the promotions network and set Price per 1,000 impressions and Price per click. Both rates are copied onto each campaign at the moment it is bought, so changing them later never re-prices a campaign someone has already paid for.

What an advertiser buys

A schedule on a paid plan promotes one of its public events from Boost → On this site. Four things have to be true before the form will open:

• the schedule is on Pro or Enterprise; free schedules host promotions but cannot buy them;
• the event is published and public, so neither a draft nor an unlisted event;
• the schedule has accepted its own place on the event, the same visibility rule the rest of the app uses;
• on a hosted install, the buyer has a verified phone number on their profile.

They then choose a headline and short description, a pricing model (per 1,000 views or per click), and a budget between your configured minimum and maximum. Targeting is optional: a campaign can be limited to particular kinds of schedule (talent, venue or curator) and to visitors in particular countries. Leaving both untouched shows it everywhere.

The advertiser pays up front. Their budget is drawn down as the promotion actually delivers, and anything unspent is refunded once the campaign ends. Because there is no outside ad network involved, the whole amount is yours.

How a promotion is chosen

Prefer promotions over AdSense is on by default, and it is what makes a matching promotion win the slot with AdSense filling in only when nothing matches. Switch it off and the order reverses: AdSense takes the slot whenever it is configured, and promotions fill only when it is not.

Some placements are refused no matter what the budget says:

• a schedule is never shown its own promotion, and neither is any other schedule belonging to the same owner;
• a promotion is never shown on the page for the very event it advertises;
• one visitor sees the same promotion at most a few times a day, set by PROMOTIONS_FREQUENCY_CAP;
• a promotion stops the moment its event is hidden, cancelled or over, even if budget remains;
• a per-click campaign that nobody clicks is paused automatically once it has had enough impressions to judge, so weak creative cannot occupy your inventory for free.

Reviewing promotions

Every promotion is reviewed before it runs. A paid schedule putting its event in front of every free schedule's audience is worth a look first, so new campaigns queue up under Admin → Boost and appear in the dashboard's "Needs attention" list. The advertiser has already been charged and is waiting, so the queue is worth clearing promptly.

Approving one starts it immediately. Rejecting it refunds the advertiser in full and emails them the reason you give.

A schedule stops going through the queue once it has a track record: it needs PROMOTIONS_AUTO_APPROVE_AFTER campaigns that were approved, ran to completion and actually delivered impressions, and it must never have had a campaign rejected. A single rejection, ever, puts that schedule back in the queue permanently.

Where ads appear

Ads and promotions appear in one place: a single slot at the bottom of a free schedule's public schedule page and public event pages, above the footer. They never appear:

• on any paid schedule's pages;
• on an event page that is actively selling tickets, so an ad can never sit beside the organizer's own buy button;
• on checkout, ticket, appointment booking, gift card or event submission pages;
• inside embedded calendars, or in generated share images;
• on password-protected pages;
• on a schedule's own custom domain;
• to the schedule's own members and administrators;
• to bots and scripted requests, which are filtered out before anything is billed.

The member exclusion means a schedule owner cannot see their page the way a visitor does. Signed in as a member or an administrator, adding ?preview_ads=1 to the URL shows the slot without counting an impression or charging an advertiser. The parameter does nothing for anyone else.

Accommodation affiliate

A separate, independent way to earn from your instance: schedules can show a map of hotels and rentals near an event's venue, powered by Stay22, and bookings made through it pay an affiliate commission.

Set STAY22_ENABLED=true and an Accommodation tab appears in every schedule's Engagement settings, holding a Show nearby accommodation toggle and a Stay22 affiliate ID field. Nothing is shown to visitors until a schedule owner turns it on there; it is off by default for every schedule, on every plan.

Who gets the commission

A schedule that enters its own Stay22 affiliate ID keeps its own commission. A schedule that leaves the field blank falls back to the Fallback Stay22 affiliate ID you set in the Accommodation affiliate card at Admin → Settings, so the commission comes to you instead. The settings page states this plainly to the schedule owner, both on the toggle itself and as a warning once the map is live without their own ID.

The fallback is never used on a schedule's own custom domain. A customer paying for a white-label domain should not have commission taken from it, so on those pages the map appears only when the owner keeps the commission.

Consent, and when the map loads

Stay22 sets its own third-party cookies to attribute bookings, so the map is never loaded when the page opens. Visitors who have already accepted cookies get it immediately. Everyone else sees a short explanation and a button, and no request reaches Stay22 until they click. Visitors sending a Global Privacy Control signal are told why the map is not loading and are given no button at all, and withdrawing consent removes it from the page. Consent given by clicking the button lasts for that page view only and is never stored.

You still have to disclose it. Add Stay22 to the third-party processors listed in your privacy policy, and describe the map in your cookie notice. Enabling this makes your instance an affiliate publisher, which is a disclosure obligation of yours, not Stay22's. An affiliate disclosure is shown to visitors in both states, whether or not the map has loaded.

Where it appears

The map is shown on a public event page only when all of the following hold. Otherwise it is silently absent, which is the intended behaviour rather than an error:

• the operator set STAY22_ENABLED=true, and either the schedule's own affiliate ID or your fallback one resolves;
• the schedule owner enabled it, and the event has a venue whose address has been validated, so it has coordinates;
• the event still has a night left to book, so a past event drops out on its own;
• the page is not an embed, a generated share image, or password-protected;
• the schedule is not the demo schedule.

Check-in and check-out are derived from the occurrence the visitor is looking at, counting the nights the event actually spans and never fewer than one, capped by STAY22_MAX_NIGHTS. Prices are requested in the same currency as the event's tickets, and a visitor arriving partway through a multi-day event is offered the remaining nights rather than nothing.

Environment variables

The two master switches, ADS_ENABLED and STAY22_ENABLED, can only be set here. Some of the rest are only starting values that the admin panel overrides; the others have no control in the admin panel at all and need a redeploy to change.

# Master switch. Cannot be overridden from the admin panel.
ADS_ENABLED=true

# Google AdSense
ADSENSE_ENABLED=true
ADSENSE_PUBLISHER_ID=ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ADSENSE_EVENT_SLOT_ID=XXXXXXXXXX
ADSENSE_PERSONALIZED=false    # leave off unless you run a certified CMP

# On-network promotions
PROMOTIONS_ENGINE_ENABLED=true
NATIVE_PROMO_PRIORITY_OVER_PROGRAMMATIC=true
PROMOTIONS_NETWORK_CPM=2.00       # price per 1,000 views
PROMOTIONS_NETWORK_CPC=0.25       # price per click
PROMOTIONS_CURRENCY=USD
PROMOTIONS_MIN_BUDGET=5.00
PROMOTIONS_MAX_BUDGET=1000.00
PROMOTIONS_MAX_CONCURRENT=2         # live campaigns per schedule
PROMOTIONS_FREQUENCY_CAP=3          # views of one promotion per visitor per day
PROMOTIONS_AUTO_APPROVE_AFTER=3     # clean campaigns before a schedule skips review

# Accommodation affiliate. Independent of ADS_ENABLED; also a master switch that
# cannot be overridden from the admin panel, because the Content-Security-Policy
# is built from it on every request. Run config:cache after changing it.
STAY22_ENABLED=true
STAY22_AID=your-stay22-affiliate-id   # fallback only; editable in the admin panel
STAY22_MAX_NIGHTS=30                # upper bound on the derived stay length