Advertising on Drupal.org Why? How? Policies

In 2007, the Drupal Association decided that in order to help provide funds for its many activities (chief among them improving the Drupal.org infrastructure) it would begin experimenting with advertisements on drupal.org. Among the goals of this program were to respect the current community based "word of mouth" marketplace from the many service providers that are part of the community and to only insert ads in sections of the site where they would be useful to site visitors.

To help get feedback from the community about these ads a forum thread about Ads in the hosting and paid services forum was created. As ads have been tested other discussions have started.

Using Google AdWords for drupal.org

There are currently two channels where advertisers can place Google AdWords ads onto drupal.org: the hosting forum and the paid services forum. You can learn more about how to target your ads to drupal.org from Google AdWords introduction and FAQ on Adwords Placement Targetting. Those two documents should help you get up and running with your ads on drupal.org in a very short time.

Drupal Association Administered Advertising

In addition to the Google Adsense/AdWords programs the Drupal Association is also experimenting with some manually created advertisements. These include affiliate ads for hosting companies, ads for internal "products" like DrupalCon or Drupal Association membership, and ads for Drupal service providers.

For these ads the process to get an ad online takes a bit longer than the Google ads above and requires a bit more effort but they are also higher value to the advertiser. Companies interested in this program should contact the Drupal Association.

Here are some guidelines for the content of these advertisements.

• The ad copy should be written by the advertiser and reviewed by the Drupal Association. Copy should be written in the first person and can link to pages on Drupal.org which show community involvement of the advertiser.
• Any images should be kept relatively small and should not be disruptive (no flashing or animated images, ideally they should be custom made and fit with the drupal.org style)
• No more than 250 characters in the text to keep the text area from being overly tall on 1024*768 browsers

Note: discussion on this page via comments is welcome but they will be pruned and included into the article in keeping with the handbook comment policy