See link via Simon Willison and the comment from Adam Wathanof Tailwind CSS.
“Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.”
I know we don’t have analytics directly on djangoproject.com, but if our docs take or are taking a similar dive in traffic due to LLMs scraping everything and users just going there, it GREATLY diminishes our pitch to sponsors. Instead of saying, sponsor us and you’ll get 1million eyeballs (or whatever) if we’re down to a fraction of that, it’s yet another reason for the marketing departments within proper sized companies to hold back.
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Wow, that’s pretty brutal for Tailwind. I wish them the best…
I do wonder how this will pan out for Django, though. I think if all sites are losing traffic, then maybe we’re still offering a good deal, relatively?
I think it is inevitable for all relevant sites.
Below is the stats of stack overflow questions over time, actually, I have not visited the website finding solution for long time. So yes I did not have chance to see the sponsor AD.
Currently we only show Daimond/Platinum sponsors on doc pages. If website traffic plumets and we know the main motivation to sponsor Django at that level is brand visibility, we could do things like:
- have a “sponsored by” message in the terminal output of management commands such as
startproject, startapp, runserver which should be roughly seen by everyone who uses Django and unlikely to be impacted my LLMs
- have a sponsored blog post (traffic to the blog may not be impacted)
- have a thank you/ad in an official release summary video
In short I think there are options to adjust the offering if we know folks main motivation is the web traffic to docs.djangoproject.com due to number of eyeballs 
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Is that something we know? (I know the Steering Council has been looking into contributor motivations, but I couldn’t find any research on Django’s corporate sponsorship.)
Looking at the seven diamond/platinum/gold sponsors currently listed on Django Community | Django, there seems to be a mixture of companies targeting developers and companies in other spaces. And only three of them use links that could even identify Django as the traffic source.
For companies in other markets, I would guess that brand visibility is not a major consideration in sponsoring Django. A company targeting the energy industry isn’t looking for leads—or even building brand equity in their target market—with a logo on djangoproject.com. Perhaps these companies are hoping to build goodwill with their employees and potential tech hires, and/or they may just use Django and want to “give back” (a few specifically mention that). Since this type of sponsor isn’t driven by traffic—or even measuring it—a decrease shouldn’t matter much. (But, you know, wouldn’t hurt to ask.)
Companies targeting developers—and specifically Django developers—might consider that loss of impressions and referrals meaningful. But their marketing teams are already struggling with that everywhere. If the rise of AI coding means you can’t reach potential customers through developer sites like djangoproject.com or Stack Overflow or even search ads, how are you going to find them? (Again, wouldn’t hurt to ask what they’d consider valuable.)
I think all of Sarah’s suggestions are great. Yet I suspect, in the (near) future, they’re subject to the same pressures as the website on visibility to potential (human) customers. If Junie runs django startproject for you, only it sees the “sponsored by” message.
And maybe that works? As developers offload at least some or their decision making to AI, the challenge for a marketer is to reach the new decision maker: the LLM. Perhaps the higher sponsorship tiers could also include a paragraph or two in Django’s llms.txt?
