

Ask HN: Decent ads for a technical audience? - eskiman

Does anyone know of a decent ad networks to use for a technically-oriented site? (I.e., what ads don't piss you off and cause you to use an ad blocker?)<p>I have considered The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/), but it is exclusive and seems to be pretty difficult to get into.
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lsc
I think I can speak to this, as evidenced to the amount of time my 'out of
space' sign has been up.

First, technical people really don't like feeling like you are manipulating
them on an emotional level, so make sure there is some compelling and
objective reason your product is better that you can highlight. (for me, that
reason is price, but I'm sure you can come up with other things)

writing technical articles (or getting others to do so) is pretty good. I
didn't ask for it, but Uggedal pretty much launched me last year[1] (that
article hit both hn and reddit front pages) - i mean, revenue pretty much went
straight from around a grand a month to around six grand a month within 30
days, and it kept going up after that (though not quite at that ridiculous
pace.)

Getting on the reddit/slashdot/hn front page is incredible.

I don't know if I would recommend my next advertising method, as it was
goddamn expensive, but I wrote a book[2]

that took a while. It was really expensive. But, it did give my company and
myself quite a bit of credibility.

As far as bannner ads go, I think they are largely useless when compared to
reddit. I have had fun playing about with project wonderful on webcomics I
like, but that is nothing compared to reddit.

[1][http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-
slicehost-...](http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-comparison-between-slicehost-
and-prgmr)

[2]<http://nostarch.com/xen.htm>

------
JayNeely
The problem is "technical audience" is still too broad to guarantee relevance.

Relevance is the most important thing when placing ads.

If you're really set on using an ad network (rather than managing
advertisement yourself) use something that will let you approve and reject
specific ads for your site, like <http://www.adbrite.com/>

Props for putting some thought into this, though.

------
kloncks
check www.buysellads.com

a lot of the top blogs use that to sell their own ads

~~~
toddynho
thanks for mentioning BSA :) I own/run BSA and would be happy to answer any
additional questions people have, if interested (not looking to hijack this
thread, just offering to explain more about BSA if people have questions).

~~~
kloncks
This is exactly what I love about HackerNews. All the important guys are here.

I'm afraid one day when I'm bashing Microsoft, 'sballmer' will downvote me and
say something mean.

