Campaigns

A campaign is paid outreach that runs the usual advertising bargain in reverse. Instead of blasting messages at people who never asked and hoping a few don’t mind, an advertiser reaches only wallets that opted in to hear about a topic — and pays each of them for the reach, plus a bounty for a reply. Nobody is contacted uninvited, nobody is contacted for free, and the money flows to the person whose attention is being spent.

This is the same sender-pays idea that prices out spam, pointed at a new use: turning your inbox from something you defend into something you earn from.

Why campaigns exist

Ordinary email advertising is adversarial. Senders want reach; recipients want quiet; the middle fills with spam filters, list brokers, and tracking. SithBit already made unsolicited mail cost the sender real SOL. Campaigns take the next step: they let a recipient advertise their own availability — “I’ll happily hear about gaming and pay-per-response research” — so an advertiser can find willing people directly and compensate them, with no list broker and no guessing.

Everyone is better off in the honest case: the advertiser reaches an audience that wants the message, and the recipient is paid for attention they chose to give.

For advertisers: reach an audience that opted in

If you run outreach — a marketer, a survey researcher, a business with an offer — a campaign gives you something a mailing list never could: a targeted audience that has agreed to be reached, and a built-in incentive for them to respond.

Target by topic, not by scraped data. Participants tag themselves with coarse interests, skills, and broad demographic bands. You filter to the wallets carrying every tag you care about (a logical AND) — e.g. interest.gaming and region.apac — and reach exactly that set.
Pay only for real reach. You fund each message yourself: the recipient’s postage (so it actually lands) and a reply bounty (paid only if they answer in time). No impressions you can’t verify, no bot traffic — every recipient is a real wallet that chose to be reachable.
Price it before you commit. A campaign quote counts the matched set and itemizes the per-recipient cost — message rent, postage, bounty, and fees — so you see the total before a single lamport moves.
Get responses, not just deliveries. The reply bounty is the hook: a recipient who answers your survey or offer claims it, so your call-to-action carries its own reward.

The whole advertiser flow — search, quote, send — is chain-direct and scriptable from the sithbit campaign CLI. A campaign send is direct-signed only: your funded wallet signs every delivery locally, so no mail server ever holds the keys to a paid campaign.

For participants: earn from your inbox

If you just want to receive mail, you never have to think about any of this. But if you’re willing to hear from advertisers about things you actually care about, opting in turns your inbox into an income stream — and you stay in control the whole time.

You choose what you’ll hear about. You publish a small on-chain beacon listing coarse tags — interests, skills, broad bands like an age range or region. Advertisers can only find you through the topics you chose.
You set the price. Your participation price is simply your mailbox’s default postage — the same price that already prices out strangers. Opting in doesn’t add a new fee to manage; it says “if you’ll pay my going rate, you may reach me.”
You get paid twice. When a campaign message arrives you keep the postage — you were paid just to be reached. Reply before the window closes and you also claim the bounty (split 90% to you, 10% to your domain authority — or to the postoffice when no active domain resolves for your mailbox). Ignore it and you simply keep the postage.
Your privacy is built into the design. Only coarse, self-chosen tags go on chain — never free text, never precise personal values. A richer profile, if you attach one, is encrypted; an advertiser who wants it has to mail you and ask, and you hand over the key only if you want to. See What’s public and private.
You can leave any time. Closing your beacon is the opt-out — you drop out of every search immediately, and the account’s rent is refunded to you.

How it works

Opt in. A participant publishes a beacon listing the tags they’ll accept mail on. Their mailbox must already exist — the advertised price is its default postage.
Discover. An advertiser runs a trustless search for beacons carrying every tag they want, and gets back each match’s sendable wallet.
Quote. The advertiser prices the matched set, itemized per recipient, before committing funds.
Send. The advertiser sends one bountied message to each match — the loop continues past any single failure so one bad address can’t strand a paid batch.
Earn. The participant keeps the postage on delivery, and — if they reply before the window closes — claims the reply bounty. Anything unclaimed is refundable to the advertiser after it expires.

For the exact commands, flags, and quote output, see the sithbit campaign CLI reference. For the money traced lamport by lamport, see Economics → Campaigns. For the design rationale behind the coarse-tag beacon and the mail-gated detail profile, see the participant-pool marketplace design note.

Where campaigns show up

In the browser, the marketplace pane’s Participants tab lets anyone browse the opt-in pool by topic.
From the terminal, the sithbit campaign tree drives both sides — a participant’s create/update/close and an advertiser’s search/quote/send.