Read the Docs Blog - Posts tagged business

Read the Docs Offsite 2019

2019-06-20T00:00:00Z

The Read the Docs team just finished our first offsite ever in April of 2019. We all gathered together in person for the first time, and talked about the future of the project.

A picture will show this better than I can:

The team at the house we rented in Aruba

The full list of attendees, which is the full-time staff, from left to right:

David Fischer
Manuel Kaufmann
Eric Holscher
Anthony Johnson
Santos Gallegos

Goals

Our biggest goal was building a shared understanding of the vision for the project. Being fully remote, it’s often hard to communicate at a deep level about mission and vision. Being together in person for a week gave us the space to understand each other and our views better.

The other large goal was to build a roadmap for the next 3-6 months for the project. We have often had smaller roadmaps, but never had the chance to discuss all the problems that we encounter with the project, and then prioritize them.

Format

We used the following format:

Before the offsite, we created a Trello board with a list of topics to discuss. This was all the major feature ideas, issues, and concerns that came up over the previous couple months.
For the first 3 days, we went through the list and discussed each topic. We took notes (almost 20 pages) of these discussions, and mostly tried to build a shared understanding on a path forward.
The 4th day we broke each section down into action items, and chunked them into 1-3 smaller sections of work. We called these “v1”, “v2”, and “v3” to break out the stages where each project could be shipped and have impact on our users.
The 5th day we took all the tasks, then sized and prioritized them. We broke things out into 4 piles representing months going forward, and tried to balance the tasks so each month had a similar amount of work in it. We then turned this into a Trello roadmap board.

This worked quite well for us. It gave us space to talk through all the various topics we had, but also gave concrete next steps to move forward on our tasks.

Outcomes

The most valuable outcome is something I said at the offsite:

Before, it felt like we were 5 contributors working on an open source project. Now, it feels like we’re members of a team.

For each member of the team, there was someone else they had never met in person before this. Having all met in person will make it much easier to collaborate online going foward, and to feel like we are working towards a goal that we all share.

In terms of technical output, the roadmap we have established will make us much more productive in our work going foward. The entire team now has vision around the roadmap items, and understands the tasks other people are working on much better. This has already lead to a much better ability to collaborate together.

We are hoping to do another offsite in 2020, and if we do our jobs right, hopefully we’ll have another teammate or two.

New Ad Format Coming to Read the Docs Community Sites

2019-06-18T00:00:00Z

We view our ad program as a way to keep Read the Docs itself sustainable, and to use it to better support the community. Advertising has allowed us to have full-time employees adding new features and responding to issues in our issue tracker. We have also been able to share thousands of dollars with the open source community via our revenue share program and grants.

Currently, about 30% of our site traffic does not have any advertising. When we first launched ethical advertising in 2016, we launched only on specific documentation themes. We purposely did this slowly to make sure our ads look integrated with Read the Docs and less obtrusive to users.

For a while, this wasn’t a problem because we had not reached capacity with advertising. We did not have enough paid advertisers to support the amount of pageviews Read the Docs served. Fast forward a couple years, and our advertising model has proven to be successful. In North America and Western Europe, 100% of pages that are eligible for paid advertising have a paid ad.

Now that we’ve hit that limit, it makes sense to expand to more themes. Rather than going theme by theme as we did in the past, especially considering the huge number of Sphinx themes, we designed an ad that would work across all Sphinx themes. This became much easier with a more simple text-only ad as you will see.

To be very explicit, this new ad format will show advertising on all documentation themes. We plan to roll this new ad format out more widely in stages:

To start with, we are going to enable this ad format for community and house advertising on pages that already have ads on them. As always, we never display two ads on the same page so this ad will be instead of any other ad.
After that, we will allow paid advertisers to use this new format. Again, we will start only on pages that already have ads.
We will email users of custom documentation themes to let them know this change is coming.
At first, we will show only community and house ads on these custom themes.
Finally, we’ll turn on our normal ad rotation to all themes. We expect to complete this by the end of July.

We will closely monitor feedback from document authors, readers, and advertisers during this process. If you have questions or comments on this, please let us know.

Text-only ads

We’ve wanted to try text-only ads for a while but it took time to get it right. From the start, we were very keen on text-only advertisements because they aren’t as obtrusive as image-based ads and they are easier for advertisers to create and experiment with multiple variations. What we didn’t know was whether users would engage with them at similar rates to our other ads.

We ran a small experiment with a text-only house ad on the Read the Docs documentation itself and the results were very promising. Engagement rates were over double our site average and even compared favorably with the same ad in the sidebar including an image. Those figures may not hold up as the format is rolled out more widely but it is certainly a good sign.

A text-only footer advertisement on the Read the Docs documentation

I’d like to thank Eric Berry over at CodeFund for some great ideas and insights around this kind of ad format.

Opting Out

We understand that advertising doesn’t work for everyone – even advertising without any user tracking.

Users can opt-out of paid advertising themselves and for any projects they maintain although they will still see community ads for open source projects and conferences. Gold members of Read the Docs get an ad-free experience and for companies we have our commercial offering at readthedocs.com which is always ad-free.

If you would like to completely remove advertising from your open source project, but our commercial plans don’t seem like the right fit, please get in touch to discuss alternatives to advertising.

Ad Funding at Read the Docs and What’s Next for Ethical Advertising

2019-06-11T00:00:00Z

It has been three years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs and while we gave a limited update in our 2018 stats, we figured it was time to give an update on ethical advertising and how it is working.

Advertising without tracking

Our ethical advertising model is still going strong. We proved that it is possible to build a business model on top of advertising without resorting to user tracking. Unlike most other ad-supported sites, we show advertising based on the context of the page, not by creating behavoral profiles of large numbers of individual users. If you are browsing documentation for a Python project, you might see a relevant ad about Python. It’s that simple and it works.

Despite a slow start to the year, we expect to earn about $75,000 from advertising in Q2. This brings our advertising revenue back to the level before our ads were added to major ad blocking lists last year.

While we do earn money from other sources such as our commercial offering, advertising continues to be our largest source of revenue and has allowed us to expand our team to five full-time people. Compared with three years ago when we were scraping along with very little money, our community issue tracker and support requests receive prompt responses.

Progress

We’ve made great progress on advertising over the past year.

We survived a major hit to revenue from ad blocking without resorting to cat and mouse games of changing ad layouts and APIs to avoid ad blockers.
Our community ads program has been significantly expanded. We are actively running free community advertising promoting over ten open source projects and conferences.
While we never tracked users with advertising, we put in place stricter Do Not Track privacy protections. We continue to believe that advertising can be well targeted without tracking users.
We launched an advertising vertical to let companies promote their open jobs to developers.
Our advertising revenue share program tripled in size.

Our ethical advertising approach, with no user tracking, has been key to our sustainability and has allowed Read the Docs to continue to build new features and give back to our community.

What’s next

We have some really interesting developments coming regarding ethical advertising.

We are looking to add a few more projects to our ad revenue share program and help more projects reach sustainability with an ethical advertising approach. If your project on Read the Docs does 100k+ pageviews per month and you are interested in exploring a new revenue stream, please let us know.

We are testing a new text-only ad format which we will detail in a future post. Text-only ads are something we’ve wanted for a while because we believe they are less intrusive to readers but easy for advertisers to experiment with multiple variations. So far the results have been very promising and we are planning to roll this out more widely.

Our ethical ad network is getting closer to launch. It’s a shame, but there’s a critical lack of funding for open source projects that form the building blocks of some extremely valuable software. We believe that advertising can fill some of that gap and Read the Docs can help by sharing some of the lessons we’ve learned building our own advertising. If you know a site that might be interested in being a beta tester of a pro-privacy ad network built specifically to help fund open source, please get in touch.

Thanks

Advertisers always have a choice where to direct their marketing spend and for many of them it would have been simpler to just go with the usual behemoth advertising platforms rather than advertising with a niche site like Read the Docs. I want to thank all our advertisers who believe in our approach and continue to support us.

Would your company like to reach a 100% developer audience?

Over 7 million developers Read the Docs each month. Get in front of them today!

Update on Ad Blocking and Acceptable Ads

2018-05-21T00:00:00Z

A few weeks ago, we shared about the challenge ad blocking presented to our sustainability and what we were doing about it. On May 4th, Read the Docs was added to the Acceptable Ads list meaning that our visitors running ad blockers who choose to allow unintrusive advertising will see our ads again. The impact to our ad views, clicks, and revenue was immediate.

Data on our inclusion in the Acceptable Ads list

32% of Read the Docs visitors run an ad blocker

Estimates around the web vary regarding what percentage of people run ad blockers and it varies heavily by industry. We discussed this figure a bit in our previous post.

It took a month from application to inclusion in the list

We discovered about our inclusion in the EasyList ad blocker list within a couple days and immediately applied to the Acceptable Ads program. No changes were required of us to meet the Acceptable Ads criteria and we also qualified for Acceptable Ads without third-party tracking.

While Eyeo, the company behind AdBlock Plus, derives most of their revenue from the Acceptable Ads initiative by charging large entities, Read the Docs did not pay for inclusion on the list.

Over half of those running an ad blocker allow acceptable ads

Given our more tech-savvy and privacy-focused audience, we didn’t know what to expect. Not every ad blocker allows acceptable ads by default and even then users can choose to turn them off.

People running ad blockers DO click on ads

We can definitively say this is true of our audience. Our click-through rate did not change based on ad blocking or our inclusion in the acceptable ads list at all.

Of the ad views and clicks blocked by ad blockers, inclusion in the Acceptable Ads list meant that 55-60% of our ad-blocking visitors choose to allow our ads. This directly translated into revenue toward our sustainability.

Building our Ethical Ads

The Acceptable Ads list is definitely a step in the right direction for us. We share the goal of unintrusive advertising that respects our audience.

People understand that advertising funds much of the web. As ads got larger, more annoying, and ad networks stored more information on millions of people, however, many people finally decided to install ad blockers. This is the largest boycott in human history and blaming users isn’t the answer.

Based on our experience with ad blocking and the Acceptable Ads list, it is clear that visitors will allow advertising that doesn’t disrupt user experience and doesn’t track people.

We are glad to have made progress toward regaining our sustaining revenue. Read the Docs is continuing on our experiment to fund open source infrastructure in a way that is a win/win for all parties, and we are glad you’re following along with us.

Ads and Ad blockers

2018-05-02T00:00:00Z

Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easylist.

Ad blocker fallout

Getting added to the EasyList had a significant and immediate impact on the bottom line at Read the Docs. Right around April 1, 32% of our ad views simply vanished. At first, we thought we had done something horribly wrong but then we discovered that this was due entirely to ad blocking. Our actual traffic wasn’t down at all.

Users’ browsers were simply downloading the updated EasyList which blocked ads on Read the Docs. In terms of ad viewership, weekdays – our busiest days and the peaks in the graph – became more like weekends and weekends fell off a cliff. We had always guessed what percentage of our user base ran ad blockers. Now we know. We knew this day would come as we became more successful but we had hoped it was a ways off considering we weren’t part of a large ad network.

This directly affected our operations and staff. Our operating costs didn’t go down in any significant way, but revenue sure did. Advertising is by far the largest source of revenue at Read the Docs and it just dropped by about a third. This meant that we had to cut some costs where we could and slow down some hiring plans. While Read the Docs is not a non-profit company, all the revenue is reinvested into the project itself, paying maintainers, and other places in the open source ecosystem. The situation is not dire by any means, but it was certainly disappointing that we ended up on the same list with popup advertisers who couldn’t care less about privacy.

All about ad blockers

Ad blockers fulfill a legitimate need to mitigate the significant downsides of advertising from tracking across the internet, security implications of third-party code, and impacting the UX and performance of sites.

At Read the Docs, we specifically didn’t want those things. That’s why we built the ad network we wanted to exist with only relevant ads and no creepy behavioral targeting.

According to a 2017 report from PageFair (pdf), a company that specializes in quantifying ad blocking, 11% of global web users run an ad blocker. Considering that Read the Docs’ core audience is tech-savvy, privacy-conscious developers, it should be no surprise that our number is higher.

What are we doing about it

It will be an uphill battle to get back to where we were in terms of revenue and sustaining Read the Docs, here are a few things we are working on:

We applied to the acceptable ads list, an ad block list enabled on many ad blockers by default that enables some unobtrusive advertising. We are very hopeful here but it does take quite a bit longer to get on this list than it does to get blocked.
Nagging users into allowing ads on Read the Docs. We are envisioning more of a polite nag in a similar vein to jsfiddle rather than an “adblock wall” which prevents usage of Read the Docs until it’s allowed.
Blogging and raising awareness of how ad blocking affects us and other open source projects.

While we could simply change our CSS and ad API to avoid blocking since we host our ads ourselves, we decided not to engage in a cat and mouse game since this work would not benefit users.

Advertising funds much of the web and many people recognize that while there are plenty of bad actors in the ad industry – think pop-under ad networks or ads that navigate your browser for you – some advertising is necessary to power the web we know and love especially when it comes to open source software which has unique funding challenges.

Update: On May 4th, Read the Docs was added to the acceptable ads list! We will collect data over the next couple weeks and have a follow-up post on what effects this had on advertising.

Open source advertising list

At Read the Docs, we also discovered that we are not the only open source project that got our advertising blocked by ad blockers. Many open source projects that fund themselves through advertising get blocked and some of them don’t have the resources to navigate the acceptable ads program or understand the inner workings of ad blockers.

Likewise, some web users may not want to allow all acceptable ads which includes many ads from the big networks but we are hoping they would be willing to accept ads that benefit their community of software developers.

We are launching a new initiative to allow advertising that benefits open source software. We encourage you to subscribe to the this list and support open source. If you run an open source project affected by ad blockers, we would love to help you too.

Advertisers

If you are an advertiser interested in reaching a 100% developer audience who cares deeply about privacy, we would love to hear from you too.

Ethical Advertising Works

2018-04-16T00:00:00Z

It has been two years since we first launched ads on Read the Docs. We figured it was time to report on the results that we’ve seen, and say thanks to those who have helped us along the way.

The Results

To put it simply:

Ethical Advertising works.

In Q1 2018, our estimated revenue from advertising is $75,000. This is enough to fund our small team of 4 people to work on Read the Docs full-time.

When we started building our ethical advertising model, we didn’t know how it would work out. We didn’t know much about the ad industry, and we were doing things different than everyone else.

We are happy to report that you can build advertising that is a win/win/win for all parties:

Read the Docs wins because we generate revenue, allowing us to sustain our operations
Advertisers win because they are able to reach our audience of developers, helping to grow their business.
Users win because their privacy is maintained, and they continue to have access to our service.

Ethical advertising on Read the Docs has not been without its challenges, which we will cover in future posts.

Tracking users isn’t required

Along the way we’ve been trying to prove a simple thesis:

We can have successful advertising without tracking our users. So much of the trouble facing the ad industry these days is because of this massive databases of user data.

We have been able to show that we can show ads without knowing exactly who our users are. The content they are reading is enough to show them targeted ads, without knowing anything about them. Specifically:

We do not let advertisers run 3rd party code on Read the Docs. Ad images and javascript is all hosted by us.
We do not provide advertisers with data dumps, except aggregated reports on the clicks and views their ads got.
We target our ads based only on geography and the details of the page being visited, not on a profile of the user.

We’re now taking a look at what we’ve learned, and how we might help more infrastructure projects reach sustainability with an ethical advertising approach.

Towards an Ethical Ad Network

We have shown that an advertising business model that respects users can also sustain critical open source infrastructure. We hope that we can act as an example for other projects that depend on ads. You can make money without giving away your users data.

Developers have the power to shift the ad industry to respect user privacy. We must start with our own projects, leading by example. We need to have all the ads in the open source ecosystem respect user privacy, and then we can start to apply pressure to other parts of the tech industry.

We realize that not every open source project can do all the work that we’ve done. We want to explore how we can build an Ethical Ad Network, where user data isn’t sent to us, but each project doesn’t need to do ad sales.

Our ethical ad network is still in the planning phases, but if you know a project that might be interested in being a beta tester, please get in touch.

Thanks

I’d like to thank all of companies who have believed in our ethical ads initiative. You can only sell something if people buy it, and I’d like to give credit to the folks who have believed in our concept:

Twilio
Sentry
Rollbar
Stream
Intel
Data Dog
Mongo
Hosted Graphite
Level 12
Pyup
Triplebyte
Linode
Digital Impact Alliance
Digital Ocean
Exoscale
Nginx
Odoo
CircleCI
Cherry Servers
Uniregistry
OSCON

Want your company to be on the list? You can get more information on our advertising page.