About our Advertising

It's been awhile since I updated this "About our Advertising" page, and ironically, in the interim since the last time I did there have actually not been *any* external advertisements running on the site. The biggest recent change was that we rolled out or new site design, and with it removed all of the Google text and banner ads. Since that time, we've been mostly ad-free. That said, we've been running ads for our first published developer.* book, Software Conflict 2.0, and we keep the Amazon and Google search boxes on the pages because of their utility and unobtrusiveness. And I do recall that for awhile last year we ran an ad for our friends at the AYE Conference.

Truth is, we never had much success with advertising anyway. We made a few bucks on the Google Adwords ads, really just enough to pay the hosting bills, but I never felt like the small amount of money was enough compensation for the ugliness of the advertisements. And I never liked the fact that we couldn't control what kind of ads would show up.

We had little success with running paid ad campaigns for direct advertisers. The ads we tried were for software development tool companies, but I think the developer.* audience is too diverse, and not in a tool-shopping frame of mind while reading the ecclectic and unique collection articles, essays, and blogs found here. The campaigns were never that successful for the advertisers--no doubt partly because I had a policy against banners, leaderboards, animation, and in-line content ads! :-) And like the Google ads, I never felt the amount of money received was enough to justify the visual sacrifice.

And as most other webmasters have found, all of our experiments with affiliate ads were total failures, except for the few dollars per month we make from Amazon purchases.

At one time, I had hoped that we would be able to generate some revenue from advertisements to pay the authors whose articles and essays we publish on the Articles side of the site. But I realized that there's no way to do that while also maintaining the stubbornly independent and often-not-hardcore-technical viewpoint and presentation of developer.*. To do the things necessary to fully "monetize" the site, I would have to create a site that I no longer wanted to be a part of, just another ad-laden IT portal.

Another factor is that we are reserving our prime ad space right now for our own venture, developer.* Books. Since we are an independent publisher without deep bookstore penetration, this site is the primary way we have to get the word out to readers about the books we publish.

So what am I trying to say? I'm not sure. I guess I'm just trying to say something that will make sense to the nice marketing and ad industry people who contact me about advertising on this site. It's hard to explain the situation sometimes, and frankly hard to turn away the opportunity to make a few bucks.

Does this mean ads will never run on this site? Probably not. I actually would be interested in direct relationships with a few advertisers who are content to have a small ad about the size of our Amazon search box. I say "content" because this kind of advertising would primarily be for "image" and "brand awareness" purposes, and should not be thought of as a way to generate lots of clicks, leads, and sell-throughs. Our sophisticated and intelligent readers are just not big ad-clickers. If you would like to talk about this, please get in touch.

Thanks for reading,
Daniel Read
developer.* Publisher, Editor, Author

P.S.

I am retaining below a list of principles that was the center of a previous incarnation of this "About our Advertising" page. It still applies as much as it ever did.

• Our purpose is to be a publishing platform for independent voices and to provide a space for a community of software professionals. Any advertising that appears on the site is in support of that aim. We are not here simply to attract eyeballs for advertising. The advertising is a means to and end, not an end in itself.
• We promise to keep our advertising discreet. The internet is overrun with sites that flash and blink and get in your face with screaming advertisements. We do not want to be one of those sites. If at any time you feel like an ad on this site crosses a line, please let us know.
• We promise you will never see a popup ad on this site, nor any kind of floating, invasive, obnoxius ad.
• We promise to never deliberately be deceitful or vague about the mixture of advertising and editorial content that appears on this site. At all times you should be able to discern what is advertising and what is not. We will not disguise paid articles or white papers as editorial content. When an advertising appears near editorial content, it should be clear that it is separate from that content. If we fail to do this in any instance, please let us know.
• We promise that there is no "outside influence" on the direction or content of developer.*. We are not in anyway beholden to advertisers, nor to any foundation, institution, or company. If at any time this changes, it will be posted clearly on the site.
• We promise never to share any information about you with anyone.
• We promise never to use our mailing list to send you invitations for "webinars" or conferences or books or product demonstrations or anything else like that. Our mailing list is not accessible by advertisers, directly or indirectly.
• We promise never to run junk advertising--no sweepstakes, no gambling, no credit cards. Advertising on developer.* should be relevant and/or interesting to our audience of software professionals from around the world. Companies we advertise should be reputable ones. In cases where ads are served up from a third party, we will do our best to only do business with reputable third parties with good policies for whom they include in the advertising network. If at any time you feel we have failed in this promise, please let us know.
• We promise never to use "viral marketing" techniques like tracking cookies, email harvesters, or anything like that.