I like community-ads. They have the word community in them, and I find it's a great way of making the "bigger brother" graduated sites give some visibility to beta sites.
On graduated sites, anyone with an account can post any ad on the community-ads meta post, and if/when they get 6 votes, they're up.
Point one: Stack Overflow.
@Doorknob asked a question, like, 6 months ago, that probably earned him a [badge:tumbleweed]: Why no Community Ads on Stack Overflow? community-ads is ironically misleading when you see it from the point of view of whoever is posting ads there.
Given the success of the Code Review rebel ad that was posted there anyway, I also, would like to know why programming-related beta sites couldn't promote their community to the Stack Overflow audience, most likely to attract clicks:
Stack Overflow
- Score: 41
- Clicks: 5.42/day, 927 total
Programmers
- Score: 18
- Clicks: 0.6/day, 102 total
Both were created last April 28, but the SO ads were reset in June, while I believe the Programmers ads are still up until December. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Point two: beta sites.
Graduated sites can use their meta post to promote whatever they want - including ads for other Stack Exchange sites. It seems very few beta sites are doing that.
Actually, given the vote threshold, it seems any beta community could come up with an ad, post it on multiple graduated sites, and quickly get past the 6 votes.
Are there official guidelines for the beta sites' point of view?
On PPCG, they ran a little meta-contest last spring, which was pretty successful.
Code Review did the same thing, and about twice as many ads were submitted.
The way we've done it, is by community-voting for the best sumbitted ad, and then that winner gets posted on relevant graduated sites' community-ads meta post, where votes fate decides what happens.
It would be nice to have clear guidelines for beta sites that want to run such meta-contests, beyond what guidelines there are for submitting a community ad (on the "target" site). Something like:
- Tag the post with a contest tag, run the contest for a month or so, depending on meta-activity; also tag with featured, to increase visibility on the main site.
- Include a summary of the design guidelines.
- Establish a list of target graduated sites. Might steer some of the submitted designs into a direction that wouldn't have been taken otherwise.
- Establish the number of winning entries that will be posted on graduated sites.
- Anyone can submit an ad, the community determines the winner(s) through voting.
- Let the number of upvotes determine the winning entry/entries (downvotes don't count?).
- Post the top N entries on graduated sites; add a comment linking to the meta-contest entry.
