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We’ve shared in the past how revenue sources such as advertising and site sponsorships are important because they allow us to reinvest back into the community. Historically, we’ve had strict guidelines against any animation in ads. As a result, we’ve walked away from some opportunities in the past that would have provided some additional revenue for the network. We wanted to see if there was a way to open up more opportunities for us to work with advertisers without sacrificing the quality of the experience on the platform.

So, this fall, we expanded the open auction advertising experiment to more sites on the network. In addition, several experiments have been conducted with lightly animated ads on Stack Overflow and other network sites to see if they would distract from the overall platform experience.

We define lightly animated ads as:

  • Animation time does not exceed 15 seconds
  • Looping is limited to 3x
  • Rich Media animation is NOT allowed (Pushdown, expandable, rollovers, etc.)

We continue to be committed to making the advertising experience on the Stack Exchange Network as valuable to users as possible. We work closely with advertisers to ensure we are showing relevant ads within relevant content, and to ensure creative formats do not disrupt workflow. None of that changes with these updates. We also draw a firm line in the sand that heavily animated ads that would distract from the user experience are not permitted within the Q&A experience.

Current Advertising Guidelines

To demonstrate our commitment to a positive user experience, advertisements on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network must meet the following criteria:

  • Distinct from Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange content and must not mimic content on the site
  • Ads with a white or light background must include a dark 1 pixel border that clearly distinguishes the ad from the content
  • Creative formats are restricted to images and light animation (new)
  • We do not accept pop-ups, expandable ads, rollover ads, floating ads, or other multimedia ads
  • Logos or brand names of advertisers must be clearly visible
  • Text on creative assets must be clearly legible
  • Calls to Action (CTAs) must be clear and not misleading
  • Creative messaging and landing pages must match. Ads can’t talk about one thing and the landing page another
  • Advertiser landing pages must be mobile-friendly
  • Any claims or comparisons made within the creative must be accurate and verifiable
  • Proof, complete with source and date of the evidence, must be shown on the creative or landing page
  • Stack Overflow allows wraps for IAS, MOAT, and Double Verify tags*.
  • Retargeting pixels* are allowed for a limited number of vetted and pre-approved Programmatic partners

Stack Overflow reserves the right to pause or cancel a campaign if creatives are not in compliance with our ad specifications. Per IAB terms and conditions, Stack Overflow reserves the right to reject ads that are deemed inappropriate for the space, given the types and themes of content, including content type and audience.

If you feel an ad goes against our guidelines in any way, we encourage you to report the ad using the Report This Ad flag found on every display banner across the network.

image of a Report Ad pop up box

*To opt out of tracking for advertising purposes, update your cookie settings/preferences.

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    I'm struggling a bit to find which part of this post is something new that 'moderators are expected to abide by'. Why is this tagged 'mod-agreement-policy'? And what change am I expected to implement in my day-to-day modding because of this? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 13:56
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    This relates to the outcome of the strike from a couple of years ago - we committed that when we made network-facing policy adjustments, we would notify moderators first, and tag them like this. Although there's no direct action for mods here, it is a network-facing policy change and we want to comply with the letter and spirit of that agreement. Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 14:26
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    "Retargeting pixels* are allowed for a limited number of vetted and pre-approved Programmatic partners" on a secret list that we will not share with you. Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 14:30
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    Can moderators remove flagged ads? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:01
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    "We also draw a firm line in the sand ..." Okay, what do you want to give me should the firm line in the sand one day turn out to be nothing but an empty hand? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:16
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    Look, all you will accomplish here is just to get users to use an ad blocker. I've used one since your AI nonsense in May 2023, but I expect I'll soon be joined my many others. Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:42
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    so whose responsibility is it to make sure the ads follow the company's guidelines? the company? this is mostly objective stuff. why would it fall on us to report violations? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 16:45
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    @starball Because the company doesn't care as long as the check clears and no-one is offended enough to complain? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 16:55
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    I don't understand why you're calling this "lightly animated"? Sounds like almost no restrictions on animation at all, if 45 seconds of animation is the only restriction. Commented Apr 29, 2025 at 14:47
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    "are important because they allow us to reinvest back into the community" also this is just disingenous. SO wants to make money, and this lets them make more money. "Reinvesting back into the community" has nothing to do with this. Commented Apr 29, 2025 at 14:50
  • @SteveBennett To be fair, they need to make money to pay their staff, keep the servers running, etc. which is something that also benefits the community. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 8:10
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    @luator I think most of us are familiar with how for-profit companies work. But it's dishonest to claim that "reinvesting back into the community" is some kind of priority. It's not. Profit is the priority. Reinvesting back into the community is way, way down the list, as we have seen many times. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 13:28
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    @TylerH no mods can’t remove flagged ads. If an ad is flagged because it either violates our guidelines or is deemed inappropriate the team that oversees ads is the one to review and remove if a violation has occurred. Depending on the nature of the situation, they may consult with our Trust and Safety and/or Legal teams. Commented May 1, 2025 at 18:16
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    @Rosie What mechanisms will be in place to stop bad actors simply reinstating violating ads? Commented May 1, 2025 at 23:43
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    Very simply, meta can be used in an 'off label' manner for community/staff communications as needed. This is documented here. Any downvotes here reflect disagreement (and there's a lot of history and context) rather than any flaws in the question being here. Commented May 5, 2025 at 12:16

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With this change in ad policy, you'll need to update the tour of some sites, including Stack Overflow:

screenshot of the top of the tour page touting "no distractions", underlined in red

Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

(emphasis mine). Ads, especially animated ones, are huge distractions. Having this claim along with animated ads is, respectfully, a damned lie.

Animation time does not exceed 15 seconds

No one looks at an ad for 15 seconds, let alone longer, so "15 second max animation time" is a pointless restriction because it's effectively the entire duration someone will have the ad within the visible viewport. Something like 3 seconds max would be reasonable.

I mean, have you seen a 15-second internet ad animation before? Can you share an example of one that's topical (for example, one that might live on Stack Overflow)?

Retargeting pixels* are allowed for a limited number of vetted and pre-approved Programmatic partners

I know it may not be new for this policy/announcement, and I know there is an option to opt-out of advertising, but for what it's worth, this kind of thing is direct enshittification of Stack Overflow. This is the exact kind of behavior that led to the development of adblockers in the first place.

You'd earn a lot of good will with the ultimate source of all your revenue (read: Q&A users) by making this opt-in, instead of opt-out. And if you're thinking to yourself "but who would go out of their way to choose to allow this?", then congratulations, you've just acknowledged why this feature in general–let alone making it opt-out–is, again, a shitty thing to do to your users in the first place.

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    How's "Ask questions, get answers, feed the AI". Seems pretty accurate :) Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:47
  • "making this opt-in" - isn't this already the case with the cookie banner? Commented Apr 29, 2025 at 21:28
  • @Bergi I assume not since Rosie explicitly mentioned in the announcement "if you don't want to participate in this, make sure you update your preferences", which implies it's enabled by default. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 20:04
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    Yeah I see that, but it sounds that would be illegal in the EU. And from what I remember, the company managed to make the cookie banner GDPR-compliant. Maybe it means "if you had opted in (to advertising in general) before, you will also get these new tracking pixels"? Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 20:33
  • @Bergi Possibly, although I don't think I would bet money that everything the company has done has strictly been 'in compliance' with GDPR, I haven't kept up on the EU there but I think they've only bothered going after a few American companies (like Meta and Google) for GDPR non-compliance so far. Maybe those are the only ones that were news-worthy, though. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 20:38
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    "No one looks at an ad for 15 seconds, let alone longer [...]" I disagree: I can't see anything BUT the ad. Just the animated ad. Nothing else. I'm trying to read the title? AD! I'm trying to read the question? AD! How about the answer? AD!!!! Just the animated ad and nothing else. All animated ads are distracting. Commented May 1, 2025 at 1:57
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As usual, I have a major issue with this.

Nowhere in your bullet list you write that...

  • Stack Overflow takes full responsibility for the content that the chosen ads provider will make available on the Stack Exchange network, including but not limited to scam campaign, false advertising, malvertising and any form of damage caused by the provided ads.

Sadly, even in the year 2025, not taking responsibility for the TRASH one allows shady third parties to post in THEIR site/app/game/whatever is the de facto standard unethical behavior most companies still take, happily shrugging off their responsibility for letting bad content reaching their users on the pretext that "it's not technically feasible to monitor all advertising" and "everyone is doing it so it is fine".

I can't blame you for this - you are not different from the thousand other companies out there doing the same. But this also means you get no "special treatment", you don't get to be the "friend we trust and can make an exception for".

Your ads will be blocked, it doesn't matter if they are 15 second animations, if they use sound, if they try to stalk the users by abusing should-be-illegal-if-not-already hacks so dear to the advertisement world.

Sites far bigger than you ended up distributing malware to their viewers thanks to the weak link in defense those shady ads providers represent. Even YouTube itself once felt for it.

You are no different. You get no different treatment.

Let the ad blocker work on
Your ads never reached me anyway

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    "Even YouTube itself once felt for it." Once??? I've been seeing MrBeast crypto scam advertisements for almost the entirety of 2024 on my phone YouTube app, before I installed ReVanced. I don't think that anything changed in 2025, and I don't think it will - as long as Google is not liable for trash they peddle through their ads, they'll happily serve their users literally anything. I'm not sure about SE network, though. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 8:44
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    @HectorFerrera I was thinking about a specific incident that had Youtube serving actual malware. Basically thanks to some exploit watching a specific ads was enough to trigger the automatic download of some malware on an unpatched, unprotected system. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 13:10
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    “Your ads never reached me anyway”. Sounds like you’re ready to let it go. Commented May 3, 2025 at 23:55
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This may be rare—I hear so often from friends and acquaintances how much they like learning from videos—but I can't be the only one, so:

One of the things that makes me want to keep a site open, or to revisit it, is a focus on text and a lack of autoplaying videos or sound. Stack Exchange has been like that, and it keeps pulling me back to revisit it. While I'm glad you're trying to keep this "limited", 15 seconds of animation does not sound "light" to me (personally speaking only!), so keep in mind you might lose a little traffic from the kinds of people that might love these sites.

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    Not more than 3 x 15 seconds. I might have left the page before the light animation finished. Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:18
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    @NoDataDumpNoContribution I'm hoping they don't mean that's multiplied, because who would call 45 seconds "light"? What would be "heavy", then? Commented Apr 28, 2025 at 15:23
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    "Heavy" is a 15 minute unskippable Youtube ad for a 1-minute "how to stop someone from bleeding out" video. But don't worry, SE'll get there eventually. Commented Apr 30, 2025 at 12:22
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We define lightly animated ads as:

  • Animation time does not exceed 15 seconds
  • Looping is limited to 3x

Does this mean that there could be a 15 second ad, looped 3 times, for a total of 45 seconds? That certainly doesn't seem light to me? What exactly are you considering "heavy"?

Or does it mean that length of ad times number of loops can't exceed 15 seconds?

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several experiments have been conducted with lightly animated ads on Stack Overflow and other network sites to see if they would distract from the overall platform experience.

This implies the experiments have already occurred. Indeed if you're updating the guidelines then you must like the results. Please release at least a summary the data/results. I'd like to understand how distracting these animations proved to be and by what metrics that was measured.

There are no results for "lightly animated" on either Meta SO (since SO was where the experiment was conducted) or on this site other than this question.

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    We delivered 10 M+ ad impressions globally that contained light animation during the testing period, which was three months. During that time, there were 0 ad reports from users that these ads were distracting or intrusive. Commented May 1, 2025 at 18:14
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    @Rosie To report an ad, we have to take a screenshot of it, save that screenshot, modify it so that it's small enough that we can even upload it because it's too big if you don't, and then we can finally submit a report. It's literally easier to make a post on MSE with the image than to report an ad, who is going to care enough to put forth that much effort to make a report that's never going to get a response indicating whether the report was even read. On top of that... why would a passive user even consider reporting an ad? the majority of those impressions aren't logged in users. Commented May 1, 2025 at 18:29
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    FWIW, that was more an issue with just reporting ads in general, that's always been an issue. I don't really see any issue with this guidelines change... because i think everyone should be blocking ads making it moot anyway. :shrug: Commented May 1, 2025 at 19:59
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    @Rosie - Too many shady ads include something that looks like a "report ad" button but is actually part of the ad, just to fool you into clicking. Seasoned Internet users know that it's not safe to click anywhere in the general vicinity of an ad. Please don't try to draw any conclusions based on ad reports from users because that entire concept is irrecoverably broken. Commented May 1, 2025 at 22:24
  • I have been distracted for 30+ minutes(!), since I found an annoying and distracting animated ad when I wanted to get an answer for a work issue. I tried to report the ad but I got an 500. now I am going through Meta to check what the hell went wrong with SO and I am not happy with what I see. they say this shit is on purpose. Commented Sep 17, 2025 at 12:27
  • @Rosie it is easy to get 0 ad reports when the ad reporting feature does not work (facepalm) Commented Sep 17, 2025 at 12:28
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I appreciate you sharing the detailed advertising guidelines with us. That makes it much easier for us to flag bad ads using wording that's more likely to result in action.

A few questions:

Does "animated" ad refer only to something like an animated GIF? Or would it also include an actual video?

Do you place any limits on the data size/bandwidth that a single ad can consume? Some ads can chew up more bandwidth than the rest of the page combined.

Instead of requiring a border around white backgrounds, can the Stack Exchange platform put its own border around ads? Not only would that ensure compliance, it would make it harder for an ad to impersonate page content.

How often do you audit ads against your policies? Many of these rules talk about the content on the page that the ad links to. Once a user clicks an ad and gets to the landing page, they can't go back and report it as violating the ad guidelines (they'll get a different ad the next time). Reports from users cannot be used as an enforcement mechanism.

What are the consequences of an advertiser violating these policies? Does the ad just get pulled, or do you enforce actual penalties that would disincentivize bad actors?

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Thanks for sharing this info. I do use an adblocker, because I find ads distracting and unpleasant, even if they are relevant ads for stuff I might use, whether they move or not. Nothing personal against any of you, or even against the company. I hope some people do find some of the ads useful and that they make you some money. But as an easily distracted person, I have a hard enough time getting anything done as it is, so I just can't be one of those people.

Just please don't do the thing a lot of sites do where you try to make me turn off my adblocker before I can see anything. I don't participate much anymore, but I really don't want to have to stop using the site altogether. That isn't meant to sound like a threat. I'm just one guy and I know it doesn't make any difference if I still come here or not. I think it's a bit silly when people are like "If you do this thing, you'll lose my business!" I'm just asking for this to please please not happen.

I hope there aren't currently any intentions to do this, but that actually doesn't matter much, because of course things can change over time. I just wanted to put this here because it's one of my few opinions strong enough to bother posting anything about.

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    I doubt they'd do that, just look at when YouTube tried to, people were updating adblocking scripts within hours to bypass the YT anti-adblocker script, and they won. Considering SO is full of developers, I'm pretty sure we'd see an anti-aniti-adblocker script made within seconds and updated for as long as necessary, if SE ever decided to add such a thing. Commented May 5, 2025 at 6:46
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    @RedStoneMatt I also doubt that they'd do that. Just not as much I used to. And I think you're also right about people quickly coming up with a fix if it did happen, and that will probably be fine for most people. Personally I prefer not to work around such things unless I really need to, but instead choose to take them as signs that I'm not in a place I want to be. Eventually I'll probably have to give up on my grumpy old man tendency to stubbornly avoid sites that annoy me, or I won't be able to use the internet at all anymore, but I'm not quite there yet. Commented May 8, 2025 at 14:36
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NEON GREEN FLASHING
Punch the funny code monkey!
NEON GREEN FLASHING
Punch the funny code monkey!!
NEON GREEN FLASHING
Punch the funny code monkey!!!!
NEON GREEN FLASHING

Or perhaps rather

Animated something-is-happening pulsing icon for 3 seconds
We have found {17} additional relevant answers found for your query
Please click here to view them

Animated ads are the gateway to further degrade the experience here on SE.
You couldn't have given me a more convincing argument that I need to step up ad-blocking even more.

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There are certain people (myself included) who run an adblocker on just about every site they visit, with very few sites explicitly on an allowlist. For me, Stack Overflow/ SE Network sites are currently one of the lucky few.

You may increase your per-ad revenue from this change, you might even see a slight profit increase overall. But with the increased annoyance of animated ads, you also risk users removing SE from their personal allowlists, something that might be hard to claw back, even if this change is reversed. Food for thought.

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  • FWIW until recently, I had even re-enabled the ads that get hidden with enough ads. The new, much more distracting ads, made me first undo the first and today I enabled the adblocker. Please someone ping me if ads ever get less distracting again. Because I won't notice it now. Commented Oct 8, 2025 at 13:28
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No Ads. That Is All.

We wanted to see if there was a way to open up more opportunities for us to work with advertisers without sacrificing the quality of the experience on the platform.


That's easy, Rosie. It doesn't take a genius or an expensive consultancy firm to give you the answer to your question. And that is: if you guys really and truly want a high quality experience for SE users, then don't bother with the ads. No one pays attention to them. No one wants them. The quality of on-line ads is so abysmally low that they make actual $hit a far more preferable alternative.


I know you guys are just going to wash your hands of ad content saying you have no control over what advertisers push, but the truth is you certainly do have control. And we're exercising that control for you by informing you that the only opporunity you really need here is to say NO to ads.


Just with this update, you've got a score of -85 so far. This should tell you guys on staff something important.

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    How do you want the platform to be funded instead then? Commented May 5, 2025 at 19:00
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    I am personally not against simple, site-relevant, unobtrusive ads, and have Stack unblocked on my ad blocker. (This might change should animated ads prove too distracting) Commented May 6, 2025 at 1:07
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    @RobertLongson Ideally like wikipedia, donation-based. I know they have far exceeded the organizational structure and capital where that is viable. But I also see no way they make back their $1.8billion with unobtrusive ads on a QA-site. I don't lose sleep over how my actions affect the bottom line of a large corporation I am not even employed at. Commented Sep 17, 2025 at 7:03

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