Good to hear from you! We also enjoyed working with Triplebyte, and still think that hiring/recruiting is a great use of EthicalAds.
In general we've also found success with higher LTV SaaS products, and you might expect for display ads. Digital Ocean, Twilio, and MongoDB are folks who have done big campaigns with us over the years, as an example. I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in like 2015 :) Running a Python-targeted campaign, with Python code in the ad image, linking to a Python-specific landing page tutorial really showed the vision for what we could build.
We've also had a lot of luck with more niche targeting for specific audiences. Our current major audiences are Backend, Frontend, Data Science, Security, & Devops: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#audiences -- Each of these audiences has had good success with folks targeting specific products (Think feature flagging in JS for frontend devs, and ML model services for data science).
As we grow and optimize our ML modeling, we're going to continue to expand our high-level topics, as well as offer more finer grained targeting.
> I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in like 2015
This sounds really interesting! I find it fascinating that Twilio was willing to do such a personalized project with a relatively small company. Would you be willing to share the story?
Specific curiosities:
* Did you reach out to them, or did they reach out to you?
* Who were you working with there? (someone in a business unit, or someone in engineering?)
* Twilio is huge with (I imagine) big reputation risk. Why were they okay with being such early adopters?
* What was the process like working with them through this campaign?
Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on our site (wrapup blog post here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/), which was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100% honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad sponsorship to not fail in public. We were doing millions of pageviews a month at that point, but had a lot of failure around fundraising. More info on the burnout and sadness of that period here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve... -- but moving on to the happy ending :)
The Twilio folks reached out as part of that campaign. Specifically it was Rob Spectre, who I think was very forward thinking about their developer outreach at the time. They wanted to sponsor us, and in return we promote the upcoming events & blog posts they were doing.
It was very lightweight to start. I think we filled out their "event sponsorship" form, they gave us the money, and we put some images & copy in the sidebar of the docs using our theme.
I think they were willing to do this because they saw the massive opportunity of the channel we had. We've been able to build a business that supports a team with almost the exact concept they pitched to us, so the value seems obvious in retrospect.
Good to hear from you! We also enjoyed working with Triplebyte, and still think that hiring/recruiting is a great use of EthicalAds.
In general we've also found success with higher LTV SaaS products, and you might expect for display ads. Digital Ocean, Twilio, and MongoDB are folks who have done big campaigns with us over the years, as an example. I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in like 2015 :) Running a Python-targeted campaign, with Python code in the ad image, linking to a Python-specific landing page tutorial really showed the vision for what we could build.
We've also had a lot of luck with more niche targeting for specific audiences. Our current major audiences are Backend, Frontend, Data Science, Security, & Devops: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers/#audiences -- Each of these audiences has had good success with folks targeting specific products (Think feature flagging in JS for frontend devs, and ML model services for data science).
As we grow and optimize our ML modeling, we're going to continue to expand our high-level topics, as well as offer more finer grained targeting.