First introduced in 2009, Open Source Ads offered the Stack Overflow community the opportunity to propose and approve ads that members thought would be of interest to the community. These ads would dynamically show up in the same spaces regular, paid-for ads would normally show up, as long as they met a specific score threshold. Some time after this, the initiative broadened to the rest of the network with the name Community Promotion Ads, and every year from then until 2020 the initiative would get a yearly refresh (aside from SO, which got it twice a year).
In 2021, we tried a somewhat different format, in response to technical needs, as well as the fact that the initiative had then gone ~12 years without any changes. The new format allowed for some more flexibility in the types of ads the community could propose, and the level of targeting they could opt for, but it unfortunately also created a lot more manual work than the Community Management Team could sustain. With many shifting priorities taking place at the time, the initiative ended up being shelved and I didn’t follow-through on sharing the experiment results promised at the time. (The initiative did well as per our advertising benchmarks, by the way! But now it’s a bit past due to share the actual data). It's been five years, but we've finally found the opportunity to relaunch this initiative with some updates to the former process.
A proposal for the renewal of Community Promotion & Open Source Ads
Back in 2021, our UX Research team conducted some interviews with community members to find out if the community found value in the initiative, and taking aside whether the format could be improved or not, our findings showed that community members valued the opportunity to take advantage of the free ad space to be used to promote initiatives that are highly relevant to them. More importantly, a common theme in the interviews was the fact that this initiative provided an opportunity for community building in a way that is somewhat lacking from other parts of the experience in the network. To us, this seems like a strong enough argument to bring back the initiative, even if we can’t address some of the pain points raised back in 2021 head-on.
This brings us to our only constraint for bringing Community Promotion/Open Source Ads back, which is that technical and logistic overhead for staff needs to be fairly minimal. As mentioned previously, the original technical solution for this initiative was retired, and the solution trialed in 2021 generated a lot of logistic work for the Community Management Team. Since we’re unable to prioritize development resources to further automate the process at this time, our solutions for this need to depend on individual communities to collect and curate a list of ads to be passed on to staff.
The flipside is that communities will have more freedom surrounding this initiative! The way we envision this, aside from the basics of all proposed ads needing to abide by our Code of Conduct and our advertising guidelines, everything else is much less rigid than any of the prior versions of this initiative. We envision communities on the Stack Exchange network would have the possibility of creating, at any point, a collection post; to define community-specific guidelines for their interests and purposes; as well as their timings for proposing, curating, and refreshing the ads. I don’t want to make it sound like we’re overlooking the fact that this generates more work for the communities, so we may propose some network-wide guidelines/standards in this or other discussions to minimize up front work for communities, if you all feel that would be helpful — but we don’t see this as a requirement, especially if you feel it would restrain the initiative from being effective and actually useful for some specific communities.
We think we can iterate on the 2021 trial’s format for what types of ads can be used (Community Promotion Ads, Open Source Ads, and “Hot Network Questions” Ads), but aren’t particularly tied to that. As before, these ads would be shown on any of the available ad spots on sites when there is available inventory, according to the targeting set by the community for each ad (as in the 2021 trial, communities would be able to specify an ad gets shown on just specific placements). The things mentioned in the “Reporting” section on my 2021 post will be reported for communities to be able to measure performance. Before we finalize the details about this initiative, we’ll provide a list of all the technical requirements (like ad size, URL, desired location, etc.) that will need to be met/provided to staff for vetting the community-selected ads, but I’m deliberately avoiding going into those details now (you can look at the 2021 requirements for a notion of what those will look like), given that I’m more interested in debating the idea at a high level, and trying to get some thoughts on the questions below.
Open questions
As mentioned, we don’t need to land on rules for the initiative that apply network-wide unless doing so would be beneficial for guiding communities through the process, but we do see some questions that would benefit from discussion in order to facilitate the process:
Who should/can post a collection post? Do we see this as a mod-only duty, or should any user on a community be able to create a collection post?
Who compiles the list of proposed ads to pass along to staff? An answer to this might hinge on the answer to the above question to some extent, but there needs to be someone who hands off a list of community-selected ads to staff (guidance on preferred format TBD).
How frequently should communities “refresh” their ads? CMs might need to bundle submissions to the Ad Ops team so they happen at most once per month, allowing for a lot more freshness in the ad campaigns, but maybe some communities would benefit from a slower cadence of ad collection, especially given curation of proposals also takes its time.
Are there other “types” of ads you’d like to see? I proposed using the 2021 ad “types” as a reference for what types of ads can be proposed for this initiative — those allowed for promoting external events and resources relevant to a community; highlighting Meta resources and information relevant to that same community; or highlighting canonical questions from your community on other topic-adjacent sites on the network — but it’s possible you can think of other interesting uses of the space for the communities.
Timeline
There are still details that need to be ironed out, as pointed out above, but I think we can realistically aim for having those finalized at some point in January 2026. Once that happens, I’ll make a post with a finalized set of guidelines for the initiative, so that communities can start their collection posts soon thereafter. Ideally, we can have some initial ad campaigns running before the end of the first quarter of 2026.
Conclusion
I’m personally excited about bringing this initiative back, as it’s been in limbo since 2021. Despite some of the limitations surrounding coming up with technical solutions, I truly believe this proposal provides a good opportunity for communities to take some ownership of the process, and to get attention to events, projects, or initiatives that are relevant to them!
Research conducted in 2021 showed community members found value in keeping the initiative, which has been a big motivator for me to not just drop this initiative. That being said, I’d like to hear from you on the above open questions, as well as more generally what value you find in the initiative, and the proposed format.
We’ll be monitoring feedback on this post for 4 weeks, until January 13, 2026 (and might be slightly slower than usual in responding during the last couple of weeks of 2025).
