Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

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Can you give a little more information regarding ad space donations, for example:

- What countries do you need traffic from?

- Do you require "a spot" on a site, or could donors just give X impressions where X is whatever number can fit in around commercial banners?

- I don't think I've ever come across 250x100 adverts before, why this size? And more importantly, why only this size, would you not be interested if people could offer you MPU, Leaderboard or Tower impressions?

edit:

Regarding how you serve adverts, I wouldn't recommend creating your own platform. We've got an in-house system that works well for us, but if we hadn't put such a huge amount of time/money into it, it really wouldn't.

Google offer a free solution for small business with less than 90m pageviews (http://www.google.com/dfp/info/sb/index.html) and might well offer it for higher numbers for non-profits, I'm not sure. Alternatively there are open source off-the-shelf solutions such as OpenX (http://www.openx.com/publisher/open-source-ad-server).

edit 2:

You should also publish who your clients are, to give an idea of what charities you will actually be supporting.

Thanks for your interest!

-While we will gladly accept traffic from almost anywhere at the moment, we are restricted to English-speaking audiences.

-That isn't an issue at all: we don't require a continuos 'spot' per se, a segment of your monthly traffic would be perfect.

-While the size itself is flexible to an extent, we do try to ensure our ads are subtle and non-intrusive, and the 250x100 rectangle is a perfect medium for that. Furthermore, the Leaderboard and Tower formats really aren't suited to the static (no distracting animations) design we utilize.

You should really re-think your stance on the size. As a website publisher, anyone wanting to run a non-standard size is going to have to A: pay me for an exclusive spot, because I can't run any other ads in that slot and B: pay for my time to write custom code for your ad. Doesn't happen often.

That's all assuming that's a size I can even fit into my design without making the site look bad. The 250px width is awkward. For us, our right rail is sized around a 300px wide big box ad, 250 is enough off of that that it's going to ruin the solid right-side margin we've designed.

Thanks for the details Tyler! The size is of course flexible, by suggesting 250x100 I was just trying to give a general idea of the small, non-intrusive style we're requesting. I've updated the post to make this clearer.

Look into the IAB (Internet Advertising Board) standard sizes. You want to pick one (or more) of those.

I don't know what traffic, if any, I'd be able to donate, but if it was more than 0 then most likely leaderboard and tower impressions are where it would be - MPUs are usually completely sold out.

As to non-intrusive, as a general policy it's something I agree on, and we look for in our paid clients (possibly not to the same extent as you, I don't know), but ultimately our sites still fit traditional banner advert sizes.

Do the charities not mind about nationality of their audiences? Even if they don't, it often makes a big difference to publishers. For example in my case, US impressions are very different to UK impressions, which are very different to Swedish impressions... etc.

edit: I also completely second TylerE's comment, he's absolutely right.

I'd steer clear of the 250x100 and other odd sizes. Stick with IAB sizes 160x600, 300x250, 728x90, which are the predominate adsizes. You'll be more likely to get into rotation on websites as a default ad with these size.

Also on corn_41 edit2: you're going to hear the word transparency a lot in the digital ad space. Everyone wants it and expects it so the more information you can put out the better.

corn_41, there's a new one! :)

Heh, the 58 minutes ago on the text melds quite nicely with your name. Even though I realized the above poster's mistake, I quickly thought that someone had made a corin_58 to post this =p

dang, apologies!

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