How to Advertise to Your Target Audience without Creeping Them Out

Welcome to another edition of Hack marketing diaries by team HackerNoon! This time, we wanna share our learnings and observations on surveillance capitalism and why we didn't make it our business model.

There’s a reason we hate those invasive Ads on Facebook.

Who would like their personal and critical information to be used to see those creepily relevant Ads?

According to the Markup - “Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online.” Meta was also involved in a major controversy last yearabout its access to the medical data of patients. The company’s pixel tracking tool was collecting their sensitive information from hospitals including the details about their health, appointments, and medical prescriptions. Pure evil.

What's even more annoying? Abrupt Ads stoping you from consuming the content. Classic example - Ads on YouTube.

Here’s how HackerNoon saw these issues when we used equity crowdfunding to become not only a publishing company but also a software company:

“We don't want to advertise the shoes you've considered buying around the web, we do want to surface sponsors that are relevant to the subject matters being read, such as blockchain sponsors on blockchain content. We believe sponsorship is not evil, if done right. What's evil is surveillance. Our sponsors will be by subject matter.
Our promotions are like billboards - relevant to the content and not the individual reader.

Our sponsorship placements are minimalistic & non-intrusive. No sidebars, no popups, no video ads. We care about reading quality and will never take that experience away from the reader.”

Presenting you HackerNoon’s Targeted Ads by content relevancy - where you target the audience interested in content relevant to your company, without invading their privacy or shoving annoying pop-ups down their throats.

Our targeted marketing options allow you to avoid the noise and reach the right audience. It’s a win-win for all. Talking about wins - here's an easter egg for your company - use the code 'HackerFriend' during the meeting and avail 10% off on Targeted Ads!

Here’s how our targeted Ads by content relevancy work:

• HackerNoon has curated 50,000+ technology tags to date
• These tags are grouped into the relevant parent categories like AI, Web3, Programming, Startups, Cybersecurity, Finance, and more!
• Every story organically gets at least eight relevant tech tags and a parent category
• Sponsors buy multimodal placements on relevant categories with all the tags and stories.
• These Ad placements include Banners, Logos, Newsletter ADs, and Audio ADs - what we call truly AIO (Activities, Interests, and Opinions)
• Optimized for: Brand Recall and Clickability (Get 3x clicks for the same impressions compared to elsewhere)
• Get quality leads at unbeatable prices, with CPM ~ $7 and CPC ~ $5. Find pricing and details in the attached deck.

Book a meeting with us to learn how AWS, Bosch, Brave, DataStax, Bright Data, Twilio, SonarSource, Algolia, Algorand, Postman, IONOS, and thousands of other tech companies partner with HackerNoon to target their audiences.

Until next time!