Stack Overflow advertising policy

Learn about the advertising policies on Stack Overflow.

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.

You can email feedback to: advertising@stackoverflow.com

Types of Advertisers

We only run advertising campaigns with advertisers who have a product or service that developers could use when they are coding. This ensures advertising is relevant for our users. Advertisers must spend a minimum of $15,000 for one month or $10,000 for three months in order to run a campaign on Stack Overflow. This ensures that our users are seeing products or services from trusted companies.

We believe advertising on our platform should be relevant to a site's content and its users. That's why we limit the types of advertising and advertisers that can run campaigns on Stack Overflow and our Stack Exchange sites.

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.

Advertising formats

  • See this page for the latest on what advertising formats we allow on Stack Overflow.
  • We do not allow autoplay video formats on Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange sites.

User control

We will not circumvent ad blockers on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange.

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.