Project completed, 2017–2019
A platform for free Wi-Fi in cafés, hostels and clubs: guests get online with their phone number and see an ad, the venue owner gets a share, and advertisers pick venues on a map and pay per impression or per click.
World WiFi was a guest Wi-Fi network with advertising. A venue installs a MikroTik router, guests connect for free and see an ad banner in exchange for access. Advertisers' money is split between the platform and venue owners.
We had to build everything except the routers themselves: a login page that works in the phone's built-in browser and identifies the guest, as required for public Wi-Fi in Russia; access through RADIUS; an installer that sets up the owner's router on its own; dashboards for advertisers and venue owners; and ad serving by schedule and place. We started in 2017 with the Adrenta ad platform and in 2018 rebuilt everything into a single World WiFi platform.
Three sides on one platform: the advertiser, the venue owner and the guest with a phone.
A list of campaigns with budget and remaining balance, pricing model (per thousand impressions or per click) and status: in moderation, ready to start, running, paused, declined, finished. The advertiser starts and pauses campaigns, new ones are first checked by a moderator in the platform admin.
It is clear how much money is left in each campaign and what is happening to it.
A campaign is set up on one page: name, image or video, a link or a Telegram channel to open, language, budget, pricing model and price. The uploaded banner shows up right away in a preview window.
Advertisers launch ads on their own, without an account manager.
Dates, hours and days of the week, and venues on the map: the advertiser clicks venues and venue clusters near the right spot or searches them by name, and the picks gather in a list under the map.
A café's ad is shown to guests of nearby venues and only at the right hours.
Impressions and clicks by month, balance and spend for a chosen period, and for each campaign its cost, average price, CTR, cost per click and per thousand impressions.
It is clear which campaign works and which one just burns the budget.
All of the owner's routers: whether the hotspot is connected, address, impressions and clicks, and a way into settings. While a new hotspot waits for its firmware, the next one cannot be added.
Owners see how much advertising went through each of their venues.
A new hotspot is created by name, the address is filled in from geolocation. Then the owner downloads the installer: a Windows program logs into the MikroTik router, adds the World WiFi guest network and leaves the venue's own network alone. The same script also runs with a single command in the router terminal.
Owners connect hotspots themselves, no engineer visit needed.
The owner decides how guests identify themselves — by a call, by SMS or through social networks — how long a session lasts until the next ad and how long to remember a guest, and turns on ad optimisation. For hotspots in Russia identification switches on automatically and cannot be turned off.
Each venue tunes the login for its guests without breaking the law.
Earnings and impressions by month, impressions today, how the bandwidth is split between the guest and the home network; withdrawals, a referral program and a marketplace of services for venues — hotel chat, live queue, polls. If enabled, hotel chat and live queue are shown to guests instead of ads.
Wi-Fi at the venue starts earning money.
The guest joins the network and sees the World WiFi page: call, get an SMS or log in with Google, Facebook or VK. For a call, the page assigns a number for two minutes — the call is dropped within a second and costs nothing. Russian and English to choose from.
Guests get online on their own, for free and without signing up.
Right after identification the guest sees a banner chosen by place, time and the venue's interests, or a partner offer if no campaign fits. After five seconds the banner can be closed and the internet used; on a repeat visit within the set time there is no need to identify again.
The advertiser gets an impression, the guest gets internet, the owner gets a share.
The router serves the guest a light page that immediately sends them to the identification server; after a call, an SMS or a social login the server creates a RADIUS account for the guest and lets them online through an ad view. The platform server picks the banner by venue, campaign schedules and the venue's interests. The login page was rewritten three times: the built-in browser a phone opens when joining Wi-Fi does not run background requests, so in the last version everything is computed on the server and the page is made of plain forms.
Scale: 22 repositories, about 5,700 commits — dashboards, the platform server, the identification service, RADIUS, router pages and installers, ad serving and the admin panel.
From router firmware and the login page to dashboards, banner selection and payouts to venue owners.
Download the installer and run it — the router is set up without an engineer, and the venue's own network is left alone.
Phone identification for hotspots in Russia switches on by itself, other login methods are chosen by the owner for their guests.
Advertisers create campaigns, pick venues on the map and follow statistics on their own, owners connect hotspots and withdraw earnings on their own.
Project completed. We worked on the platform in 2017–2019, with the latest changes in February 2019.
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