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My name is Juan M and I'm one of the community managers here on the network. You can read more about some of what I'm working on here and here.

For several years we've had advertising on technology-related sites. But many of our sites aren't about technology at all, so we haven't sold ads for them. That hasn't been a hardship since Stack Exchange sites require only a small investment from the company to set up and keep live. Thanks entirely to the efforts of your community, this site has become an amazing resource on the internet. Generating revenue from non-technology sites will enable us to dedicate more resources to meeting your needs so this is good news.

The test starts May 21 and our advertising team will be monitoring to see how ads are performing. We don't know how many ads will run on this site. It could be just a few or a bit more. In either case, these ads will be carefully vetted and we'll be keeping watch to continue to provide good content.

If you see any ads that are inappropriate or have any questions about this experiment, please let me know by starting a new question and tagging it with . This is a work in progress and we are expecting a time of learning and refinement as we move forward.

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    Thank you for giving a community a say in what ads are shown here :)
    – JonathanReez Mod
    Commented May 20, 2019 at 22:01
  • I presume that users with sufficient reputation will not see ads, same as on all the other sites. If that's the case, then how would the site's most active and trusted users, who don't see ads, be able to evaluate which ads are appropriate?
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented May 21, 2019 at 21:05
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    @GregHewgill All users should see the same number of ads regardless of reputation level during the experiment phase. Once the necessary data and metrics have been gathered, we can start the discussion for reducing ads for trusted, active, high reputation users.
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented May 21, 2019 at 21:27
  • Is there a discussion somewhere on the suppression of ads for high-rep users? I'd be interested in seeing it.
    – DJClayworth
    Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 17:34
  • @DJClayworth No on Meta. Those discussions will happen internally first.
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented Jun 3, 2019 at 21:31

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It's May 22. The only ad I have seen so far is for Stack Overflow for Teams. It has appeared on every page I've looked at so far. I guess I was expecting to see travel-related ads. I suspect that an ad for Teams is not going to perform very well here, especially when it appears three times on the page...

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    Good observation. As mentioned, this is a test so we're running targeted ads as the inventory allows. When the inventory is turning or low, you will see ads for Teams and such until another can take its place. This is normal behavior for now. Thank you for bringing this up!
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented May 22, 2019 at 13:52
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Being a high level user on Travel and having an ad blocker I did not see much ads so far. But the few that came through were very annoying, between the question and the higher ranked answers.

If the site insists on ads, please keep them away from the answers, side bars or bottom of the page is just acceptable.

You may need ads, you need users more.

(Or accept that all users of internet block all ads.)

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  • Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass this on!
    – Juan M Staff
    Commented Jun 10, 2019 at 14:38

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