Posts by David Fischer

Advertising update and open sourcing our ad server

It’s been a while since our last advertising update and it felt like a good time to talk about what’s working with our advertising model and how things are getting better.

In our 2019 stats post, we broke out our advertising revenue which was fairly flat year over year. The way our ad business is structured, our revenue mostly grows with increases in traffic and Read the Docs is mature enough that it isn’t doubling in size every year.

Optimizing Sphinx Documentation for Search Engines

Recently, we published a guide on SEO for technical docs with the goal of helping documentation authors and project maintainers create docs so that end users can find what they’re looking for easier.

One developer asked me point blank after I mentioned our new guide, “Hasn’t Google closed most of the loopholes that sites use to rank better?”. I’ve heard this opinion from a few technologists before so I wasn’t too surprised. Moz.com, an authority on search engine optimization, makes a distinction between what they call black hat SEO and white hat SEO to differentiate between these “loopholes” and more useful site improvements that help SEO.

Adding Custom CSS or JavaScript to Sphinx Documentation

In the Read the Docs documentation, we have a number of how-to guides to help people solve specific problems with Sphinx and Read the Docs. By far our most popular guide is on adding custom CSS and JavaScript to Sphinx.

In some older versions of Sphinx, this process was a little more challenging and it wasn’t as easy to figure out how to do it from the Sphinx docs. Sphinx 1.8 really streamlined this process especially for the simple cases.

New Ad Format Coming to Read the Docs Community Sites

We view our ad program as a way to keep Read the Docs itself sustainable, and to use it to better support the community. Advertising has allowed us to have full-time employees adding new features and responding to issues in our issue tracker. We have also been able to share thousands of dollars with the open source community via our revenue share program and grants.

Currently, about 30% of our site traffic does not have any advertising. When we first launched ethical advertising in 2016, we launched only on specific documentation themes. We purposely did this slowly to make sure our ads look integrated with Read the Docs and less obtrusive to users.

Ad Funding at Read the Docs and What’s Next for Ethical Advertising

11 June 2019
David Fischer
San Diego, CA
advertising business sustainability ethical ads

It has been three years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs and while we gave a limited update in our 2018 stats, we figured it was time to give an update on ethical advertising and how it is working.

Our ethical advertising model is still going strong. We proved that it is possible to build a business model on top of advertising without resorting to user tracking. Unlike most other ad-supported sites, we show advertising based on the context of the page, not by creating behavoral profiles of large numbers of individual users. If you are browsing documentation for a Python project, you might see a relevant ad about Python. It’s that simple and it works.

Tips for Getting a Developer Interview

Over the last month, the Read the Docs team conducted 30-40 customer development interviews with hiring managers and recruiters at companies ranging from 5-person companies to the biggest names in tech. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers.

Last time, we covered some tips for hiring managers based on what companies told us they were doing. This time, we put together tips for candidates looking for their next job based on insights we heard from hiring managers.

Lessons From and For Hiring Managers

Over the last four weeks, the Read the Docs team did dozens of customer development interviews with engineering hiring managers. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers. We talked to people looking for talent at five person companies all the way up to the biggest names in tech. In this post, I am going to cover some of the common things we heard from hiring managers and share some ways for hiring managers to improve their company’s process. In our next post in this series, I will have some actionable tips for job seekers based on the same interviews.

Since this is a long post, I figured I’d share some of the key takeaways:

Tips to Hire Developers with Read the Docs

Read the Docs is probably not the first place you think of if you are recruiting. However, over 7 million unique developers use Read the Docs each month from all over the world. We didn’t set out to build a better job board, but after a number of advertisers used our ethical ads for recruiting, we discovered that Read the Docs was a great place to find developer talent.

Developers are not always actively job seeking by browsing job boards or company careers pages. However, they are on Read the Docs reading about the libraries and frameworks they use. Even when people aren’t actively looking for a new job, many are open to exploring new opportunities.

Community Advertising

06 September 2018
David Fischer
San Diego, CA
advertising community updates community ads

As part of our ethical advertising model, Read the Docs gives away 10% of our ad inventory to projects, conferences, and other initiatives in the open source community. Many of these projects operate as Read the Docs did in the past with little to no income. These are not groups that traditionally have the resources to use paid advertising.

We have run ads for:

HTTPS for Custom Domains

Read the Docs hosts documentation for over 80,000 open source projects and over 2,500 of those projects are hosted on their own individual domains. Documentation hosted on *.readthedocs.io has supported HTTPS for a number of years, but one of our most requested features was to make HTTPS on other domains easy. Today we are happy to announce that Read the Docs supports HTTPS on custom domains!

Earlier this year, Cloudflare contacted us to support HTTPS for the thousands of open source documentation projects on their own domains. They generously provided us with their SSL for SaaS package to ease the integration on our side.

Planned Move to Azure

We wanted to make you aware that on Saturday August 18 at 10:00am PDT (1:00pm EDT, 17:00 UTC), Read the Docs will be having a scheduled downtime of approximately 4 hours.

To ensure the stability and performance of our system, we are performing this upgrade during the weekend which is our period of lowest usage.

Read the Docs Public API

Recently, we revamped Read the Docs’ public API. Previously, our latest API (v2) was used by our build processes but not heavily used by outside users.

As part of this process, we put effort into making sure the API is easy to use to access Read the Docs projects, builds, and versions, easier to filter builds and versions by a particular project, and that the documentation is up-to-date.

Do Not Track at Read the Docs

Today, we are pleased to announce that Read the Docs honors Do Not Track (DNT). DNT is a browser preference that requests that a user not be tracked across the internet while browsing the web.

While there isn’t a consensus on precisely what DNT should mean, we are following the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) guidelines for Do Not Track as we believe that gives a good balance between the privacy expectations of users and the reality of running a business and keeping Read the Docs sustainable.

GDPR: What it means for Read the Docs

Your email inbox has probably been bombarded over the last few days and weeks with “Updates to our Privacy Policy”. These emails pertain to an EU law called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect today.

The goal of the GDPR is to put users back in control of their data. It is an important step toward respecting users’ privacy. The days of collecting as much data on as many people as possible without consent and sharing it with anyone willing to pay for it are over.

Update on Ad Blocking and Acceptable Ads

21 May 2018
David Fischer
San Diego, CA
advertising sustainability business adblock

A few weeks ago, we shared about the challenge ad blocking presented to our sustainability and what we were doing about it. On May 4th, Read the Docs was added to the Acceptable Ads list meaning that our visitors running ad blockers who choose to allow unintrusive advertising will see our ads again. The impact to our ad views, clicks, and revenue was immediate.

Estimates around the web vary regarding what percentage of people run ad blockers and it varies heavily by industry. We discussed this figure a bit in our previous post.

Social Version Control Log in

Today we are announcing the ability to log in or sign up to Read the Docs with your favorite version control hosting services like GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab. This was one of our most requested features and it has been something we’ve been meaning to launch for a long time.

For new users, the sign up process is significantly streamlined. There’s no new password to remember and when you’re ready to start building your docs, Read the Docs will be ready with a list of your repositories to get started.

Ads and Ad blockers

02 May 2018
David Fischer
San Diego, CA
advertising privacy sustainability business adblock

Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easylist.

Getting added to the EasyList had a significant and immediate impact on the bottom line at Read the Docs. Right around April 1, 32% of our ad views simply vanished. At first, we thought we had done something horribly wrong but then we discovered that this was due entirely to ad blocking. Our actual traffic wasn’t down at all.