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Drupal.org Digital Advertising Update

The Drupal Association is 4 years into our initiative to diversify revenue streams to make the Association more sustainable and less reliant on DrupalCon to fund all of our programs.  Monetization on Drupal.org itself is an important revenue stream that helps fund various Drupal.org initiatives and improvements

We’ve focused much of our effort creating new content that both serves new audiences and provides revenue opportunities, however, we’re still only monetizing roughly 20% of our total site traffic.  When we began, we outlined a few important guidelines for our efforts, including:

  • When possible, only monetize users who are logged out and not contributing to the Project.
  • Address the industry-wide shift to Programmatic Advertising, which is the automated buying and selling of digital advertising.

We’re piloting a new ad program to help us better achieve our monetization goals, while still respecting those users who actively contribute to the project.  We want to experiment with more traditional, high visibility banner ads that you typically see on other websites, such as 970 x 90 Leaderboard ads.  We also want to better leverage 3rd party ad networks and exchanges.  These new advertising placements will automatically check for two things before they display:  1) is the user an active contributor(based on contribution credits) and/or 2) is the user a Drupal Association Member.  If either of those are true, the ad won’t display.

New Ad Network Partner:  Carbon Ads
In addition to the pilot program above, we are also piloting a relationship with a new ad network sponsor, that is tailored to the audiences we serve. When we first launched advertising on Drupal.org, the community asked that ads remain relevant to the Drupal ecosystem. We agree that this is important, however, this makes it extremely difficult to leverage 3rd party ad exchanges like Google. While they offer category filters, it’s impossible to guarantee that every ad served will be relevant to Drupal.

Vertical-focused ad networks exist, although they’re becoming less common. We’re excited to announce that we’ve recently started working with Carbon Ads, a closed ad exchange that limits its advertisers to tech and developer focused advertising. They have a sales team of about 12 people working directly with companies like Microsoft, Slack, and Digital Ocean, and an advertising operations team that manages and uploads all ad creative themselves. This removes a lot of the risk that other self-serving ad platforms pose.

Why we love Carbon Ads:

  • They are a closed ad network (there’s far less risk of malicious, offensive, or unrelated ad content appearing on Drupal.org).
  • They are GDPR compliant.
  • They don’t track site visitors with cookies, nor collect their personal data for ad targeting. You can learn more about their data policy here.   The most sensitive data they collect is the IP address which they use to decide whether to show ads in a specific regions.  Furthermore, none of the data collected are stored permanently.
  • They come highly recommended from partner sites like Vue.js, Laravel, and Bootstrap.

It’s important that we fund Drupal.org improvements, and that we do so in a responsible way that respects the community. Thanks for taking the time to read about our initiatives, and please tell us your thoughts! 

We will be listening, identifying common themes and responding to feedback in about a week.
 

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