I’m curious where folks land on advertising on djangoproject.com. We do the JetBrains/PyCharm fundraiser which is to benefit Django, but also has a commercial benefit. I think that’s an excellent initiative that I’d like to see other businesses copy.
It also made me wonder about including actual advertising on the site, beyond one-off deals with sponsorships. For me, I think this is reasonable provided there are limits on what types of advertising is shown. I think most software engineering, programming, business, communication products and services would be acceptable.
If you’re comfortable, please share what you think. Even “I don’t have an opinion on ads” is a helpful signal.
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We have the “Diamond and Platinum Members” on docs.djangoproject.com - it probably would be nice to feature them more on djangoproject.com.
But if you’re thinking of turning it into something like what weather.com has become, please, no.
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Yeah I’d be supportive of showing sponsor logos on the website, but not the kind of random ads that keeps showing up because I clicked a random product on a shopping website.
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I completely agree with the consensus here. Relying on standard tracking based ads would definitely hurt the site’s credibility, but there’s a massive difference between that and curated, context-aware sponsorships.
What if the project looked into developer-focused, privacy-first ad networks like EthicalAds or Carbon Ads? They strictly serve ads relevant to software engineering and don’t rely on cross-site tracking. This keeps the aesthetic clean, aligns with the community’s values, and opens up a steady revenue stream that could be funneled directly back into funding Django Fellows, community initiatives, or open-source grants. I think most developers would gladly support that kind of ecosystem.
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This is what I would be okay with. Read the Docs has ads through EthicalAds and I’ve actually enjoyed getting those as I find them informative.
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One place where I like Ads is the Changelog podcast (I know it’s not a website), but those folks give some real thought as to who they let advertise with them and that means I often learn about a new tool to checkout or I am reminded about an existing one.
Broadly I would be fine with trying it out for a period of time and if we then got some structured feedback either way.
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From the perspective as a user with a visual processing disability, I would recommend with going with an option like the ads on read the docs, as those ads are not too distracting from the main content, compared to the banner ads used elsewhere on the internet.
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+1 on relevant, text based, non tracking ads.
We could also do weekly sponsorships for the entire site (and docs?). Companies pay for a short message and a link that appears prominently, but is still relevant to the audience and not intrusive. I learned about this model from Troy Hunt and Simon Willison.
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For some context, the Ops team is looking into supporting analytics on the site and are budgeting for 50-75M page views per month. This was from our Fastly logs. So if someone is using EthicalAds publisher calculator, be sure to switch it to CDN metrics. The lowest number I’ve found is $0.50 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) from CarbonAds. Which EthicalAds estimates at about $7,500/mo (90k/yr).