Surveillance capitalism… How about we not make that our business model?
Here’s how HackerNoon saw it 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 either site-wide or by subject matter.
We think there is a major difference between a "sponsor" and an "advertiser":
Our promotions are like billboards - relevant to the content and not the individual reader. Without sponsors, we can't make the site free for readers forever. 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.
One of the main reasons Jonah Peretti left Huffington Post and started Buzzfeed was because the ad system was not baked into the tech. By increasing the ad duration and having no sales middlemen, Hacker Noon has been able to offer customers better rates and better relevancy, and we'll have healthy margins with longer-term customers. We want to own the relationship with the brands and have quality brands that validate the content. We have been extremely selective in choosing which brands to be HackerNoon sponsors and will continue to do so going forward.”
So, how does ad placement by content relevancy work at HackerNoon now?
- 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 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 - truly AIO (Activities, Interests, and Opinions)
- Optimized For: Brand Recall and Clickability (Get 3x clicks for the same impressions compared to elsewhere)
Book a meeting with us to learn how AWS, Brave, DataStax, Bright Data, Twilio, SonarSource, Algolia, Algorand, Postman, IONOS, and thousands of other tech companies partner with HackerNoon to target their audiences.