The earnings system sounds like marketing until you trace one real payment through it. Here is the whole path, with the arithmetic shown along the way.

The numbers up front

Advertisers set a maximum bid per 500 impressions and compete in a second-price auction with a $1.00 per 500 impression floor. You receive 50% of the clearing price for each verified view. The exact amount varies with live demand and is recorded on your ledger.

Step 1: the editor asks for a card

Every so often - never while debugging, and never when your editor is not the window in front - the editor requests a card matching the generic tags of what you have open. That request contains tags like lang:rust and whether your theme is dark. No filenames, no code, no paths: those fields do not exist in the request.

Step 2: the server serves, and writes it down

The server picks a campaign whose targeting matches, serves the card, and records the serve. This record is what makes verification possible later - a receipt that does not match a recorded serve earns nothing and bills nobody.

Step 3: you see the card, and a receipt comes back

The card sits in the corner for a few seconds. When the viewing conditions are verified, your editor sends a receipt referencing the serve. Matching receipts are what convert a served card into a paid impression - fabricated ones are worth exactly nothing, which removes any incentive to fabricate them.

Step 4: the ledger gets a row

The moment the receipt verifies, two things happen atomically: the advertiser's budget decreases, and your ledger gains a row crediting your half. The row carries the exact amount to six decimals and joins an append-only list - rows are never edited or deleted, only added to. Corrections arrive as new reversal rows that point at what they reversed, so nothing disappears quietly.

Your balance is not an authority that happens to have history; it is the sum of the rows. If the cached total and the rows ever disagree, the rows win.

Step 5: watch it happen

Two windows show the same truth:

In the editor, the earnings view shows your balance and recent rows.
On the web, your dashboard shows available and lifetime totals plus the full ledger, paged through 25 rows at a time.

Administrators can read your ledger under audit - and their reading writes its own audit row. There is no internal view with different numbers.

Step 6: control the trade-off

Settings gives you the dial: Off, Light, Standard, or Max. Standard means at most one card per 30 minutes and eight a day, counted on your machine. The server may make limits stricter than your setting - it is structurally unable to loosen them. Turning ads off changes nothing else about the editor: same features, no nag screens.

What it adds up to

ADCode is not a salary. It is a capable editor whose price is a few small cards an hour, refunded to you at half rate, on a ledger you can check line by line. Any product telling you more is doing arithmetic it hopes you will not repeat.