Posts tagged advertising

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.

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:

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.

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.

Ethical Advertising Works

16 April 2018
Axel Sepúlveda
Portland, Oregon
advertising business sustainability ethical ads

It has been two years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs. We figured it was time to report on the results that we’ve seen, and say thanks to those who have helped us along the way.

To put it simply:

Ads on the Alabaster Theme on Read the Docs Community Sites

16 June 2017
Axel Sepúlveda
Portland, Oregon
advertising community updates community ads

We’ve been running our ethical advertising campaign for over a year now, and it is starting to show success on making Read the Docs more sustainable.

Over this time, we have only been running ads on Read the Docs themed projects. The primary reason for this is making sure that our display of ads is consistent and doesn’t negatively impact the user experience. We’re trying hard to build a sustainability model that respects our users, and making sure things are well designed and unobtrusive is an important part of this.

Uniregistry sponsors Read the Docs and Open Source

Today we’re excited to announce an important sponsorship partner in our Ethical Advertising campaign: Uniregistry. Our goal with our ethical advertising program is to provide important funding for open source, and show that it can be done ethically – without tracking our users and only offering ads from relevant partners.

Domain registration was identified early as a natural partner to our program, because it sits in the stack of necessary infrastructure for all of us that work on making the internet. We wanted the right partner, because historically we feel that domain registration companies have had awful UX. We’ll cover a few of the criteria we used to reach the conclusion to partner with Uniregistry.

Running ads with Sentry

We’re excited to announce our first partner in our Ethical Advertising campaign: Sentry.

Sentry was a natural first partner, both because they have a long history supporting and contributing to the open source community, and because they also strive to support open source while building a sustainable business around their project.

Advertising on Read the Docs Community Sites

On Monday, we enabled an ad space on documentation pages hosted on readthedocs.org. We have tested the ad space in the past, and had followed up with a discussion of the implications of advertising. The space was meant to be totally unobtrusive to the browsing and usage of documentation pages, and doesn’t enable third-party tracking of users in any way. This is all in an effort to help raise funds to support continued support and maintenance on the project, and ensure free and open documentation stays available.

Read the Docs is a massive project, and requires a large amount of work to keep running and support. We receive support requests and must tend to the operations of the servers on a daily basis. Neither of these tasks lend to volunteer contributions, they both require dedicated support roles for such a large site. I’ve personally been wearing a pager in support of the project for over 4 years, all on a volunteer basis.