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Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 2013

So begins our newest iteration of the Community Promotion Ads! We're doing these on a yearly rotation now.

What are Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.

Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?

This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

  • the site's twitter account
  • useful doodads and gizmos for UX experts
  • interesting articles or findings for the curious
  • cool events or conferences
  • anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.

How does it work?

The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

  1. All answers should be in the exact form of:

    [![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

    Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.

  2. The question must always be tagged with the magic tag.

Image requirements

  • The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
  • Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (Imgur)
  • Must be GIF or PNG
  • No animated GIFs
  • Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB

Score Threshold

There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.

Display and Statistics

You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click statistics here.

Photoshop file for creating UX-styled ads

I've created a Photoshop file used to create the 5 below UX-styled ads, which you can download here

- Rahul

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  • Since we don't have any other ads at this point, does someone want to take a stab at designing another Twitter ad? Can you improve on the design and get a better click-thru-rate?
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Dec 21, 2011 at 14:13
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    @Patrick Part of me figures that time would be better spent figuring out what other things you guys can come up with for ads.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Dec 21, 2011 at 14:40
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    How about commercial products used by UX designers with which members of this community are affiliated? As long as that affiliation is disclosed in a comment, and it gets the requisite 5 up votes, I don't see anything wrong with that.
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Dec 21, 2011 at 14:52
  • 6 upvotes, but yes, that's a valid avenue.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Dec 21, 2011 at 15:13
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    @Rahul Advertising your own (as in, UX questions, not specifically those authored by any individual) questions on your own site seems a bit... misaimed. Especially if they're highly voted questions which we already advert by means of them having high votes.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 14:40
  • @GraceNote I think it works great for informing new visitors (which we get a lot of now that we're out of beta and Jeff/Joel/Jin tweet about us) and showing them which questions are standouts. I'd like to see whether they get clicked on (if they get enough votes) and determine the best course of action following that.
    – Rahul Mod
    Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 14:49
  • @Grace Note; could you please take a look at the comments under Handicraft advert and give your opinion? Thx
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 16:38

10 Answers 10

Reset to default
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Hit me!

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  • 10
    I love this one, I just wish we had something better to promote than the twitter account...
    – Zelda
    Commented Jan 31, 2012 at 15:07
  • I LOL at this one. Awesome.
    – Steven T. Snyder
    Commented Mar 9, 2012 at 21:17
  • this is amazing
    – Jason
    Commented May 30, 2012 at 19:44
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You should follow @StackUX on Twitter.

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    This ad is working great -- we have 389 followers -- so I think we should keep it around.
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 1:12
  • How do you know the followers are thanks to the ad? And how do we know all of the 389 followers are real followers and not eg. bot/spam accounts?
    – Rahul Mod
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 10:13
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    1. I don't know. 2. Spot check. :-)
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Dec 2, 2011 at 12:06
  • @Rahul It's been clicked 435 times. meta.ux.stackexchange.com/ads/display/377 So probably most of the followers came from (a) people who clicked the ad and (b) word-of-mouth tracing back to someone who clicked the ad.
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Dec 21, 2011 at 14:10
  • 2.22 clicks per day is nothing near to great. IMO the twitter just feeds spambot links, so however good the banner is, the feed needs to be more interesting
    – Naoise Golden
    Commented Jan 2, 2012 at 18:07
  • @Naoise Yes, upvote this feature request if you haven't already. meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92235/…
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Jan 2, 2012 at 19:31
  • Might it be better incorporating a button providing a better visual call-to-action
    – Roger Attrill
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 9:09
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Handcraft is the best way for designers and developers to work together

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    While @Rahul's tool looks great - I think promoting it here is a pretty blatant conflict of interest, especially since he's a moderator.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 17:01
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    Why is it a conflict of interest? One of the purposes of community ads is to promote products of interest to the community. Is Handcraft any less relevant because I happen to be a mod?
    – Rahul Mod
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 17:19
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    Because you earn money from this product, and you are using your standing in the community to actively promote it. You've also mentioned the product in multiple places on the site (in answers for instance). I'm not trying to be difficult, but I don't feel it's acceptable behaviour for a moderator.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 17:40
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    ux.stackexchange.com/faq#promotion "[..]We also offer free community promotion ads for open source projects and non-profit organizations."
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 17:48
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    ooooooooooooooooh, this is contentious .....
    – colmcq
    Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 18:02
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    @codeinthehole I asked the community in advance before posting it whether they would have a problem with it and they did not, as you can see from the fact that it received enough upvotes to be displayed on the site. The guidelines you refer to are just that: guidelines; there is no hard rule saying that commercial ads cannot be shown. If I felt there was a conflict of interest I would not have offered the ad. It's here because I truly believe it adds value for users of the site and I welcome any other member to include ads for their products where relevant.
    – Rahul Mod
    Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 3:36
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    @Rahul, I'm sorry but in my opinion it needs to go. Commercial entities pay for advertising on the stackexchange network. Your standing as a moderator and a high scoring user most likely had an influence on the opinion of the seven users who upvoted the advert. I find the fact you can't see this as problematic quite concerning.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 9:44
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    @codeinthehole See the comments on the question. I suggested creating banners for commercial products because we haven't managed to come up with any better ideas. Grace Note agreed that it would be acceptable. If you'd like him to rule on this specific ad, you'll need to comment on the question to get his attention. (Since he's not in the comment thread on this answer @replies don't work.)
    – Patrick McElhaney Mod
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 2:59
  • @Patrick McElhaney - thanks for the heads up Patrick, didn't realise that the @ replies had that limitation.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 16:39
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    There is no policy because the first time this came up (on Super User, see here), the community decided what belongs through the vote. "My wish is not to have to wrap a hard policy around what is permissible. This isn't really about "commercial" vs. "non-commercial." Perhaps If we could instill these criteria into the submission/voting process — make it clearer what the INTENT of the ads are — the community voting can better decide which ads provide community value..."
    – Robert Cartaino
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 18:05
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    @codeinthehole We do not have policies against neither self-promotion nor commercial products for our Community Promotion Ads. They still have to get through community vetting - if no one in the community wants to see the stuff pushed, it will not. It is not required, but it wouldn't hurt (and this was suggested by Patrick) to disclose affiliation in an immediate comment. It's otherwise up to the community to determine what does or does not get shown, by voting.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 18:27
  • @Robert Cartaino - thanks for the clarification. I was viewing the advert in a commercial light, and followed my gut instinct when I saw it. I can see the benefits of not trying to impose dogma. I think community gain should be the driving incentive behind any community promotion advert posting - and perhaps that could be a useful yard stick when deciding eligibility.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 23:04
  • @Grace Note - thanks also.
    – codeinthehole
    Commented Feb 28, 2012 at 22:15
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Examples of placebos in UI design? Find out on UX!

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    all I get is 'clickthough url'. broken link? or funny joke i'm not getting?
    – rlemon
    Commented Feb 21, 2012 at 1:56
  • Sorry about that, fixed it
    – Rahul Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2012 at 2:36

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