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About Advertising on RootAdmin

As consumers, technologists, software developers and sensible people with a brain we are generally good at understanding what we need, what's available in the market, and what will work for us. We're also, like most of our readers, very good at recognising utter crap in advertising that's insulting to our common sense.

Pop up interstitials with loud videos will get your attention. Ads crafted to resemble a navigation element or download link may get your click. The chances that you'd ever buy a product from that advertiser are slim to none.

We built CodeProject and its sister sites on the principle of respect, sharing and openness. We are software developers ourselves and have written a lot of commercial software that has saved developers, collectively, millions of hours of dev time. The only way we could get software in the hands of those who could benefit was to talk to those who we felt could use the software, discuss the features, let them know the price, return policy and support, and let them make up their own minds. A conversation. Or, as we prefer to call it, advertising.

Advertising for us means a respectful presentation of an offer that's clear, unobtrusive, inoffensive, on-topic, factual and straight to the point. We use advertising to pay for servers, for admin, for enormous amounts of bandwidth and occasionally for a 4PM beer on Friday afternoon. When we built CodeProject there was no one who could supply us with advertising that was clear, unobtrusive, inoffensive, on-topic, factual and straight to the point. No one. So we formed Developer Media in order to manage our own advertising as well as the advertising for like-minded sites.

The advertising you will see on this site is hand-picked. We offer a small fraction of our space to third party advertisers to fill in remnant space, but each of these ads has a reporting feature both from Google and from Developer Media. If you find an ad that's offensive, obtrusive or off-topic report it and we will remove it.

Advertising isn't a war. Advertising is a conversation between two groups who share a common interest. Many of the advertisers on CodeProject, for instance, are members of CodeProject who contribute code, answer questions, and use the wealth of knowledge and feedback to make their products even better. Sharing code for free is a beautiful thing, but there are times when a commercial package with support, a helpdesk, full docs and a legal agreement for the lawyers is necessary. The people selling this software are developers and technologists like yourself, and all they want to see is people using their work, their art, their blood sweat and tears.

Malware and malicious advertising

The vast majority of our ads come directly from the software company (or their representative agency). Developer Media handles and posts the creatives directly into the Google-owned DFP ad serving platform. Remnant advertising is also served through this and Google works diligently to ensure these ads are clean.

Why DFP?

We use DFP because they are the industry gold standard. If an advertiser would like to show a certain number of ads to potential customers then DFP will ensure the correct number are served, will filter out spurious clicks and click fraud, and will provide advertisers with full details of what was served where.

What happens if I get a virus or malware warning from an ad?

In the unlikely event you do get a warning about an ad please let us know immediately. As soon as we have a bead on the ad we'll shut it down and escalate it up to the advertiser, the agency, Google, and anyone else we can chase down. Malicious advertising is simply not acceptable.