General Principle and Policy

Our users come first

Putting our users first has always been part of the fabric of Stack Overflow and the advertising business specifically.

We will be transparent with our users on what we’re offering related to advertising and provide a feedback mechanism for them to raise concerns. When appropriate we will directly respond to users to understand the root cause of their feedback. We will also give the users the control of what categories of advertisement they want to see.

Email feedback

Stack Overflow advertising policy

We have a team of salespeople that sell advertising campaigns to companies. We don’t sell advertising to just any company .

Targeting:

  • Advertisers can target their campaigns using topic tags.
  • Advertisers can target by geography, which is identified through Google Ad Manager, based on a visitor’s IP address (which is truncated by Google).
  • Advertisers can target by industry or company size, which is identified using IP address and matching that to Dunn & Bradstreet data.

Measuring:

  • We allow advertisers to use MOAT, Doubleverify, and IAS tags on their campaigns to monitor for fraud.
  • We also offer conversion pixels so advertisers can track conversions that happen within 30 days of an ad being served. See more here .

Advertising formats:

  • See this page for the latest on what advertising formats we allow on Stack Overflow.

User control

Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange

We will not circumvent ad blockers.

We are working on an update to user preferences on Stack Exchange that allows users to choose their ad experience (i.e. the type of ads they want to see) and give users the ability to flag an ad.

Q&A

A running list of questions from the community and responses from the Advertising team.

Do you allow autoplay video formats?

No. This type of video ad unit is not allowed on Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange sites.