The purpose of this issue is to share a Drupal.org advertising policy for community input. It was developed by the Drupal Association and reviewed by the Drupal.org Content Working Group.

The policy is intended to set guidelines for how we advertise on Drupal.org, with the aim of providing an advertising experience that complements Drupal.org and supports our community values. The guidelines include where we can advertise, how ads are labeled, who can advertise, etc.

Whatever decisions are made in that policy will be rolled out to new and existing advertising initiatives, like Try Drupal. Please review the draft of the advertising policy here. We would like a period of public community feedback. Feedback is open until the 2nd of July. At that time, we will incorporate the feedback into the final policy.

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Comments

dasjo’s picture

David_Rothstein’s picture

Overall this looks like a good policy. A few pieces of feedback:

  1. The difference between content and advertising messages should be clear to the average user.

    "Average user" makes it sound like it's OK if 50% of users are confused and can't tell the difference.

    According to http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-held-responsibl... (which I linked to in the other issue) the United States Federal Trade Commission believes ads are a problem if they mislead a "significant percentage" of users, which they define as 10-15%.

    I would suggest adopting that standard instead.

  2. The ad is labeled with terms such as “Advertising”, “Advertisement”, “Partner Offer”, “Supporting Partner” or “Sponsorship” to distinguish it from content

    Some of these terms are much more understandable than others. "Advertisement" is pretty clear, for example, but I don't think "Partner Offer" necessarily conveys that something is a paid advertisement. See http://digiday.com/publishers/5-charts-show-problem-native-ad-disclosure for some more information on the different terms and how effective they are believed to be.

  3. I would like to suggest adding something, I'm not sure how it would be phrased though, that requires the amount of advertising per page to be limited in some reasonable way. I do not think it is good to have pages on the site, especially prominent pages, which are entirely or almost entirely taken up by paid advertising.

    As an example, a page like this looks like it has a good balance (mostly real content, but with some advertising in the right sidebar):
    https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0

    But pages like this, which currently contain nearly 100% advertising, do not have a good balance:
    https://www.drupal.org/try-drupal
    https://www.drupal.org/hosting

David_Rothstein’s picture

Just for reference, the other issue had links to a lot of outside documentation on advertising standards which are useful to look at.

A couple in my comment: https://www.drupal.org/node/2471244#comment-10019455

And a lot more in Nedjo's comment: https://www.drupal.org/node/2471244#comment-10019619

clacina’s picture

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the Drupal.org Advertising Guidelines. We're going to take some time to review your comments. We'll get back to you with follow up questions/comments before releasing the updated policy. The final step will be to roll out to new and existing advertising programs.

clacina’s picture

Thanks again to those who contributed feedback on the Drupal.org Advertising policy. The policy has been posted on the footer of Drupal.org here - https://www.drupal.org/advertising

We will keep this issue open for feedback. If the advertising policy needs to be updated in the future, we will create another issue and request community feedback before any changes are made.

David_Rothstein’s picture

My feedback in #2 was missed, but still applies.

tvn’s picture

catch’s picture

Status: Needs review » Needs work
FileSize
206.41 KB

I just noticed the new advertising on core release pages a few weeks ago, there are several problems with it:

1. It's intrusive. It directly takes up vertical space above the release notes, which theoretically everyone using a new release should read before they use the release.

2. The current advert is very misleading - it says "don't worry about download or install files!". I'd also wonder exactly how long it takes their auto-installer or update manager to be updated with new Drupal core patch/security releases.

3. There was some discussion about a donation button at https://association.drupal.org/node/18808 which would not have had either of the above two problems, but it seems like that proposal, despite coming from the DA itself, has been ignored or discarded without any further discussion prior to implementation of the ads.

https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/8.2.6

xjm’s picture

I'm also quite concerned about #8. I understand that these pages can be useful for targeting, but the ads should be chosen very carefully to avoid distractions from the critical information on these pages, and possibly should be in a sidebar that is source-ordered at the end of the page rather than the beginning. That's less desirable for the advertisers, but release notes are more important and we should not compromise them.

David_Rothstein’s picture

Re a donation button, I seem to remember it existed at one point (and https://www.drupal.org/node/2139417#comment-8204529 suggests I'm right)....

The donation button I had no problem with. But I'm not a fan of having the ad here.

catch’s picture

Here's what the Drupal 8.2.3 release page looks like on google now...