You may have seen our vote-based advertising for open source projects on Stack Overflow — Stack Overflow users create ads for their favorite open source projects, and the community votes for the projects they'd like to see promoted on the site.
In response to the popularity of that program, we've extended this vote based advertising program to all the public Stack Exchange sites.
Per-Site Community Promotion Ads
There are likely other activities of interest to your community beyond asking and answering questions, such as:
- Highlighting and promoting activities in the per-site community blogs
- Cool applications or open-source projects related to the site
- The site's Twitter feed
- Promoting relevant events or conferences the community should know about
- Anything else the community would genuinely be interested in
The goal is to help visitors find out about the cool stuff your community is doing and help promote activities they find important. And it's all visible right there on the sidebar next to every question, and the homepage.
So how does this work?
Start by creating an original 220 x 250 image ad for a product, service, or event of interest to your community. Then head on over to the meta site for that community and find the latest post tagged community-ads to post your submission.
(If your site does not yet have a community promotion post on its meta, contact me to request one, or simply post a meta request asking for it to be created.)
Here are a few examples:
Ask Ubuntu Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2011
WordPress Answers Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2011
TeX - LaTeX Community Promotion Ads - 1H 2011
Your ad has to conform to certain guidelines, and there is a minimum score threshold an ad must achieve (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site. The ads and voting are reset every six months, so you'll have to submit a new ad for each cycle. Refer to the individual meta posts for details.
Incidentally, we just reset the Free Vote-Based Advertising for Stack Overflow, so get on over there to issue your new ad submissions and vote for your favorite content!