We're enabling display ads on select Stack Exchange sites

Question

We knew that the Stack Exchange Network would eventually play a bigger role in contributing to the financial end of our business, but we didn't know how long that would take. Turns out, it was roughly six years from the time that we decided to put all of you in charge of the topics that Stack Exchange serves.

TL;DR: See the title, and scan this post for a bulleted list of sites that will soon be showing advertisements. "Display Ads" are advertisements that aren't job listings.

We always knew that the value of the Stack Exchange network of sites would be realized in ways that translate into things that are way more important than money. We're home to over 150 of the safest communities on the internet where anyone seeking knowledge can learn from very high-quality information, a fact that makes me (and I believe many of you) insanely proud of what we've done.

But money is important, too, at least for now. It helps us do things like pay our data-center bill, keep Joel caffeinated, and continue to grow the company so that we can continue to find new ways to serve your needs that aren't being very well served elsewhere.

Without further ado, here's a list of sites that will soon be displaying excessively considerate, ludicrously on-topic advertisements:

• Electrical Engineering (formerly "Chip Hacker" from the Stack Exchange 1.0 days!)
• Raspberry Pi
• Blender
• Code Review
• User Experience
• Geographic Information Systems
• Cross Validated
• Magento

Hey, you – stop looking at arbitrary numbers in order to figure out why these sites were selected; I'm going to get into that now. The first thing that is important to note is our client base consists entirely of companies that want to reach or hire programmers.

The above sites share the following characteristics:

• The topic serves developers in ways that Stack Overflow didn't or couldn't when they were created,
• They have a minimum of 50,000 questions and answers combined,
• They receive a minimum of 15,000 visits per day (on average),
• It became clear that our clients were not going to stop asking us if we'd be expanding our inventory to also cover these sites (to which the answer was a very firm "no" until now).

We do not, and will never define the success of a Stack Exchange site by the fact that it became part of our advertisement inventory.

And it's very important that none of you do that, too. Advertisements aren't in any way a measure of success of the site. Success for your site remains people being able to ask questions and learn in the safe environment that our moderation philosophy fosters. Keep the focus on quality, friendliness, safety – that's what works.

Will my favorite site be showing ads one day?

The answer to that question is most likely going to remain probably not for a very long time. Let's imagine that Pets overtook everyone else in its topic space and became the size of Super User. That'd be fantastic, because pet owners would all be looking at much better information! And that would remain the reason that it's fantastic for probably years to come.

Why? Because engagement at that level has to be consistent over a long period of time before we'd even dream of looking at advertisements, and we'd need quite a few clients that want to reach programmer-y pet owners – that would take a while.

What do you mean by excessively considerate, ludicrously on-topic?

We annoy the heck out of our customers by telling them nope more often than saner for-profit organizations would be remotely comfortable doing. We have a very strict criterion for ad quality and relevance and we positively refuse to lower that bar.

Instead, we work with our clients to better understand the folks that they'll be reaching, and help them design campaigns and creatives that are respectful and relevant to you, while being profitable for them. It's an insane amount of work.

Does this affect community ads?

No. Most of these sites have a dozen or so community selected ads in rotation; you'll just soon see advertisements from our clients, too.

Thank you, all of you.

We placed what our communities would mean to people ahead of any and all priorities to make money through facilitating their creation; every single one of you has helped us prove that this was the best possible choice that we could have made.

To those of you that so graciously give your time to our sites by helping others learn and keeping them the safest places on the Internet for people to do that, you should always be very proud of what you're doing.

Today, it got a little easier to keep the lights on, and a few extra treats in the snack jar. And for that, thank you.

Answer 1

I think enabling advertisements is a good thing. The method of advertisement Stack Exchange uses is the least annoying advertisement I know, and often communities have asked can you show me ads now I have gained enough rep to hide them? or can our site have ads too?. That demonstrates the good mindset SE has to their users.

Today, it got a little easier to keep the lights on, and a few extra treats in the snack jar. And for that, thank you.

And that is the main reason I think this is a good idea. In order to keep the sites running, Stack Exchange needs revenues, as it is a company. Money has to come from somewhere. These advertisements will bring in more to secure the future of our sites. Thank you for that!

Answer 2

I think display ads on SE are a fine thing.

SE is so far the only site that has managed to serve ads that are interesting enough that I'd consider deliberately enabling them (for Stack Overflow) for my benefit, and not only the site's.

I think expanding these well curated and deliberately picked display ads to other parts of the SE network is a savvy move and not hurtful to the user experience at all.

Answer 3

As a user of one of the more non-programming sites (Electrical Engineering), I'm concerned that ads on our site will not live up to the "ludicrously on-topic" statement. The first hint for concern is given above:

The first thing that is important to note is our client base consists entirely of companies that want to reach or hire programmers.

There is a very large segment of electrical and electronics engineers that do not program, and the majority of the programming that is on-topic is embedded systems programming. These ads were served on EE.SE, and I do not consider them to be on-topic.

I am not opposed to ads, but I don't think your advertisers will get the bang out of their buck that they were hoping if similar ads are posted. I can list many electronics-related companies that do advertisements on sites (not StackExchange) that have similar topics of interest, and they have generally considerate ads.

For example, here is one done by a major distributor/reseller of electronics components, and another from a company that makes software for electronics engineers. Both are static images, reasonably informative, definitely on-topic, and are about as considerate as ads can be.

Answer 4

I am hoping that 'excessively considerate' will also relate to the amount of bandwidth and processor overhead consumed by the ads. For various reasons I have been using some low-powered machines recently and I've noticed that

• Some websites are so bloated as to be unusable, and this usually seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of advertising content
• Stack Exchange is almost always fast and smooth; it seems nicely and efficiently coded.

So I'd just hope that the second point will remain true, even with the ad content.

Answer 5

If the ads will have the same quality that the community has, no problem. Furthermore, the "Career Ads", I like the way it's being advertised, it does not annoy me.

Answer 6

The decision to display ads on Stack Exchange Sites seems to be fine and we should all as a community member should support it. As the community has given us a lot in these years.

They are running best servers and keep the community running always and that is where the need of money comes, that is to keep running such a big network uninterrupted.

It can be a fun and profitable to every community user also as they can get some deals via ads and save some bucks :)

Guys support the decision. And yes always thankful to the Stack Exchange providing such a good platform.

Answer 7

Please do not give advertisers control of their ads

There have been reports of malicious parties using ad networks on tech websites to push javascript, flash, or other executable code ... as they know that there will be a high number of people with elevated privileges using those sites. Even if they're not on a privileged account when viewing those sites, if they can get a foothold on your personal machine, they might be able to use that access to hop to your work machines.

As such, I would hope that StackExchange would accept only static images or HTML, tweek & re-save images (to prevent JPEG exploits or similar from coming through), and serve them from machines that StackExchange controls (so third parties can't swap out the image after it's been approved, or insert cookies to track people to sites where they can force code on us).

Answer 8

I've just started seeing the occasional ad on the GIS Stack Exchange and as you can see at lower right in the image below they are relatively unobtrusive and something that I am happy to see in exchange for the availability of our site.

Answer 9

1. No developer should worry on ads, they can simply install an adblocker into their browser (or use any similar solution).
2. Using ads means the SE (Inc) will have financial interests to make also these smaller sites well-going. It is very useful; it means there will be probably more attention from the side of the CMs to produce communities which are working actively to improve the well-being of their new members. Small core teams of the sites, although they are relatively active, but they produce only few hits in absolute sense. Furthermore, they have a significantly smaller chance to click into a banner.

We will see, what is coming out from this. Happy company budget :-)

Answer 10

Generating revenue to keep the Stack Exchange Network vital and growing is obviously important if one considers it valuable (and I, for one, do). In the original post, a primary stated concern is that the advertisements be "excessively considerate, ludicrously on-topic"; however content is not the only issue with advertisements. The form of the advertisements is also important. This is implicit in the post of @JoeH who makes the request to "not give advertisers control of their ads".

I am currently re-reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (Public discourse in the age of show business) and in the fourth chapter of the book (The Typographic Mind) he gives a very brief review of the history of advertising in America. Of note for present purposes is that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advertisers assumed that "potential buyers were literate, rational, analytical" (p. 58) and so "advertising, [...] understood to consist of words, was regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose purpose was to convey information and make claims in propositional form. Advertising was [...] intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions" (pp. 59-60).

I would characterize most Stack Exchange readers as "literate, rational and analytic". Consequently, I would suggest that the advertisements respect the character of the user and be restricted to text advertisement without images.

Answer 11

Independently on whenever you believe that ads should be shown or not, you can improve the topicness and quality of the ads presented voting for them. That way you can improve the quality of the ads shown to you and on your site, that doesn't depends on click through.

Answer 12

I like SE very much as it works now.

One very important to me is, that all sites of the Stackexchange Networks are NOT distracting when doing hard work on code and research. But perhaps its a personal issue, I find all ads more or less distracting and they consume my concentration bit by bit, because I have to subliminal filter out the background noise from the information.

Could SE perhaps offer that: I have no problem to pay, e.g. let's say 1-2 US-Dollars a month, and so could everybody do with the same wish to keep the site as a distraction free environment. All other may accept the new ad policy. That means using SE will be free for all to use.

What do you think? Is this concept too unfriendly? Everyone could choose their preferred model, but in the end SE can pay the bills and perhaps more.

Answer 13

Do developers even see ads? I can't remember the last one I saw.

As far as I understand, the page stats will show that the ad has been viewed by users, but because it's blocked at the user end, it isn't seen. So companies will be paying money for a low visibility rate. "A lot of traffic" doesn't equate to "a lot of good traffic".

Answer 14

Ads are a good thing because I want Stack Exchange to be around forever.

If it means getting a few little annoying ads to "help keep the lights on", I'd vote yes any day.e

That being said, if these ads get too extreme, or they are of the "cheap ad" nature, I will be using adblock.

It would be cool if these ads were intermittently on pages too, similar to how (I believe) the "network" ads are. It make it more likely for people to not leave because they were annoyed at ads.

Answer 15

I love it. I use ad blocker, I will disable it for a while because I'm just curious what ads you have.

Answer 16

I don't mind Ads if it helps support SO. Love it more if we, as users can vote up/down and add comments on the ads.

It will probably help the company who pay for the ads to improve the product and the ads.

Also if MSFT put ads in the linux tags would likely got vote down more often than if they place it with Windows tags.

MSFT should pay more if too much down votes for their ads on Linux tag. :-)

Answer 17

I am sure you have your reasons. But ads are still a bad thing.

The flood of advertisements is one of the major illnesses of public communication. It's paid manipulation, and there is way to much of it everywhere. You promise to put up an effort to keep the damage low, but that does not make ads a good thing. Just less evil. All the positive reactions make me doubt the rational capabilities of the crowd here.

Answer 18

Your focus is on quality, but this thread says otherwise:

Clearly Rejected Answer - Upvotes and Rep

Direct quote: "Helping the specific person who asked the question is nice side effect." From Nick Alger

You have a new focus in your business model, which is to sustain current user patterns but also keep your new clients happy (the ad companies that write the checks). It's easy for you to say a firm "other forums won't suffer" just as you said a firm "no" to protecting the code related forums. You had a reason to protect those forums, and now you've compromised that.

You heavily weight the power of those who post answers over the power given to those who ask questions, and are confused why some don't accept any answer given. Follow the link in this answer. You've already begun a pivot for your business, it's time to update your business model and philosophy to reflect that.