I'm happy to announce that Stack Overflow's program of free vote-based advertising for Open Source projects, originally proposed back in September, is now live!
Some say Stack Overflow is now the largest programming site on the internet.
I'm not sure about that, but I can tell you that Stack Overflow regularly gets well over a million pageviews per day. While we've done some responsible advertising since March 2009, we still have a lot of excess (or "remnant") ad inventory, and more of it every day.
Rather than let this go to waste, we thought it might benefit the programming community if we could let the programming community use our remnant ad inventory space to publicize open-source projects in need of programmer assistance.
Here's how it works:
- Visit the special meta.stackoverflow.com question thread for this advertising period. It will always be tagged [open-source-advertising].
- Construct a 220x220 image advertisement for the open source project that you would like to publicize to your fellow programmers.
- Post an answer containing your image to the question. It must be in exactly the right format, as documented in the question itself.
- Get at least (n) upvotes for your answer.
- Your advertisement will now be featured in Stack Overflow's remnant ad inventory, in the sidebar ad slot on most pages.
In other words, it goes directly from this answer on the meta question:
To an advertisement to your fellow programmers on most pages of the Stack Overflow site itself:
I'm thrilled to see this go live, as I think it'll help get the word out about a lot of interesting open source projects that are in need of programmer input. Kudos to Portman Wills, who you may remember from our (sadly failed) Amazon ad experiment -- he was instrumental in getting this done. (Have I mentioned how nifty his site shuffletime is? Go check it out!)
Now, while these ads are absolutely community driven, we do reserve the right to exert editorial control and disallow any ads that we aren't comfortable running on our site. Above all, they need to be (mostly) professional and on topic for our fellow programmers. The specific rules will always be in the latest meta question tagged [open-source-advertising]; please read carefully before posting.
So, what are you waiting for? What open source project would you like to see publicized on Stack Overflow? Brush up on those Paintbrush or GIMP skills and make it happen!