This week on CodePen Radio, we talk advertising. Both sides: using advertising as part of a business model as well as using advertising to grow.

  • 1:20 We use advertising on CodePen. Shortly after we started, we decided that we should use advertising on the site to help pay for server costs.

  • 2:35 We used BuySellAds.com at first. They are a full service ad agency. You have to sign up and get approved (they focus on selling ads for sites in the tech space). Once you’re approved, they give you a snippet of HTML/JS to put on your site. So for us, it was very little work.

  • 3:48 They took a (25%) cut of revenue: if we charged $500 for an ad on CodePen, they took something like $125 from that.

  • 4:17 We’ve only ever had a single ad at a time on the site. We’ve also been really conservative about where we place the ad on the site as well. We always try to make it look good and support the content we have on CodePen.

  • 5:48 We used BuySellAds for awhile, but the opportunity came along for us to switch to The Deck. The Deck is well known for being a premium ad service for sites like Daring Fireball, Jeffrey Zeldman, Marco.org, and more.

  • 7:57 The Deck worked well for us for awhile, but eventually we decided to find sponsors and sell ads ourselves. There are ups and downs, but the money is better.

  • 9:11 The goal all along was to continue to increase our revenue as our pageviews rose. We realized that as our number of visitors to the site rose, the ad space was more valuable. So we negotiate higher prices based on that value.

  • 10:14 Because we started selling ads ourselves, the complexity of selling ads increases. There isn’t an easy way to find buyers for your ads; you have to develop relationships within the industry and hope that people who want to advertise on your site will reach out to you.

  • 11:57 Running ads yourself is a bit of a pain. You have to track CPM for your buyers, decide how much to charge for CPMs, and so much more. It’s a lot more work.

  • 14:35 We track ad views using tracker gifs. It’s a very simple setup, but it makes is easy to provide accurate view counts.

  • 16:32 How we handle payments from advertisers? They can pay us however they want: PayPal, Stripe, check, etc. We built our own invoicing system, but you could use Harvest or Quickbooks. We lean towards writing our own tools for things like this, because the initial time investment will pay for itself in the long run.

  • 19:42 There are certain lines in advertising we’ll never cross: no weird tracking cookies. No popups. One ad at a time. No companies that aren’t aligned with our values.

  • 21:13 We also won’t put ads in the CodePen editor itself. Primarily it’s a question of space – it’s already a tight quarters. This is not the place for that.

  • 23:28 If you are interested in advertising on CodePen, please reach out to us! We still have space available.

  • 24:02 Is advertising right for every app? How does advertising affect our users? How does it affect the choices we make about future features?

  • 28:09 Is advertising a part of the business model? Yes. Even though it is part of our business model, our goal is to always have a functional, enjoyable-to-use website. We put user experience before ad revenue.

  • 30:02 When you are a Pro user, you don’t see ads anywhere on CodePen. In addition, anyone who views PRO user’s Pens won’t see ads either, because we don’t want the PRO users to feel that we are monetizing their content.

  • 32:15 We load the ads into the page through JavaScript. The advertisers get to do almost anything they want, because we are loading their ads inside of an iframe. So they get some flexibility with what they can do inside the box. We also did some responsive design CSS tricks to make sure the ads look good on different size screens.

  • 35:30 Dealing with Ad Blockers

  • 37:18 What kind of advertising have we bought for CodePen? We’ve given away some free PRO accounts at conferences and sponsored a few podcasts, but other than that, we haven’t bought much advertising.

  • 42:46 It’s important to know what the value of a customer is: how much will a customer bring you in revenue over time, and how much are you going to spend on advertising to get that customer? You want to make sure that you are tracking that and getting your money’s worth, otherwise, you may end up losing money on each customer you get.

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