During the past five years we have investigated and evaluated different forms of sponsorships and/or advertising. At the same time we've been exploring free options for non-commercial, educational and other entities with important contributions to the field.
For a historical perspective see
- Proposal: Biostar Wants To Run Your Ads. Feedback Requested.
- Biostar Ads Are Now Live. Feedback And Comments Are Sought.
- Commercial advertising on Biostars
This week marks a new approach towards making the site fully self supporting. We have accepted advertising from a commercial entity: The NVIDIA GPU Conference.
Our goal is to make advertising relevant, well marked and unobtrusive to the users. For now ads will run only for non-registered users. If we were to extend this to all users those with lots of contributions will have the option of opting out altogether. (This post will have a banner for all users to put it into context).
One way of supporting the site is by visiting the sponsors - but not just with click - I have always disliked calls to simply click a link. If the topic interests you at all take a few minutes and look of their content - remember that commercial applications of bioinformatics is where the most career prospects are.
We have updated the terms for advertising (see link below). In a nutshell we offer commercial (products for sale), non-commercial (workshops, conferences, resources by an educational institute) and free advertising (open source software developers or tool makers).
Advertising terms: https://www.biostars.org/info/advertise/
Sounds good. I don't personally mind seeing ads on Biostar, if they are focused on Bioinformatics topics and if they something of interest.
actually this is a good point - small diversions are ok - we'll evaluate a mode where ads are shown once per day for registered users.