Useful and relevant advertising

The Drupal association aims to provide useful and relevant advertisements to the community. We have rejected high payment advertisements that are not relevant to the Drupal community. We have targeted advertising programs to small subsets of the Drupal.org site, where advertisements are relevant such as book advertisements in the handbooks section, hosting advertisements in the hosting section, and services advertisements in the paid-services forums. Our goal is to build a fair and open marketplace for advertising that is useful and relevant to our community. Creating a market for advertisements that are relevant and useful has proven quite difficult and has limited the financial success of this program to date. We are committed to supporting our community, both Drupal.org users, and Drupal service providers in a fair manner.

Advertising programs

The Drupal association offers two Google advertising channels on Drupal.org. To purchase Google ad words targeted for Drupal.org hosting or paid-services ad sense channels please visit:
What is placement targeting
Creating a placement targeted campaign

To submit a bid for header banner advertising in the paid-services forum please send the following information:

1. Advertisement in HTML format that meets the dimensions of the header banner. e.g. MMHosting advertisement
2. Detailed description of your involvement and support of the Drupal community (200 words max)
3. Ad rates either at CPM or sales commission rates.

Submit information via the contact form, select the Drupal.org advertising category.

Affiliate hosting links

We are currently developing a list of known Drupal hosting providers and signing up for their affiliate programs. We aim to get these hosting providers to mention Drupal on their site as well as provide an affiliate commission from the links at http://drupal.org/hosting.

Creating a fair marketplace for advertisements

The Drupal association currently offer two forms of advertisements. Google Ads allow for an auction advertisement system for competitive low cost per click advertising rates. Even the smallest advertising budgets can afford to compete for a window of advertising. We use Google ad sense because of the accessibility for advertising and the competitive nature of their advertisement delivery, which ensures a fair market value for displaying advertisements.

We are currently evaluating technology for banner advertisements and working to create processes for delivering custom ads and creating a competitive market for advertising so that Drupal association can earn fair market values for delivering ads. We have not yet been able to create an easy way for multiple ads to be delivered and evaluated in a competitive marketplace. We are experimenting with different ad systems to see if they can meet this need.

Creating sustainable revenue for running Drupal.org

Drupal.org creates a tremendous value for Drupal's economic ecosystem. Running Drupal.org costs tens of thousands of dollars in capital hardware costs, data center costs, and highly skilled services for maintenance, and growth planning and implementation. The Drupal association aims to make Drupal.org an economically sustainable web property. We aim to balance the needs of the community with revenue generating possibilities such as relevant and useful advertising.