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As your site is undergoing our new design-independent graduation process, you'll be enjoying your own run of design-independent Community Promotion Ads!

What are Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.

Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?

This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

  • the site's twitter account
  • interesting blogs, websites, and other language learning resources
  • conferences, meetups, or other events
  • anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.

Why do we reset the ads every year?

Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.

The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.

How does it work?

The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

  1. All answers should be in the exact form of:

    [![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]
    
       [1]: http://image-url
       [2]: http://clickthrough-url 
    

    Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.

  2. The question must always be tagged with the magic tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

  • The image that you create must be 220 x 250 pixels
  • Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
  • Must be GIF or PNG
  • No animated GIFs
  • Absolute limit on file size of 40 KB
  • If the background of the image is white, there must be a 1x1 border of not-white at the edges of the ad

Score Threshold

There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.

You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

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  • Thanks, Grace! I sadly lack the artistic skills to contribute an ad, but I'm looking forward to our talented members' contributions :)
    – WendiKidd Mod
    Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 20:16
  • Hmm, not sure, but wouldn't this go off better if we get a design first?
    – M.A.R.
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 10:29
  • @inɒzɘmɒЯ.A.M not sure why... they're ads to be displayed on ELL, not ads to advertise on other sites... I think you're confusing this question with a question like this one: M&TV VS the equivalent.
    – Catija
    Commented Sep 11, 2015 at 22:00
  • Here's my attempt at brainstorming: "Having a problem with the site? Head to meta!" "Are you writing a comment? Does it answer the question? Post an answer instead!" "Have you searched ELL for an answer already? Try searching EL&U!" "Want to teach people your native language? Try one of our other language sites!" "Want to practice English? Join our chat!"
    – user230
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 7:37
  • @snailboat I like the idea for an ad directing folks to chat.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 22:46
  • @ColleenV I don't really have any graphic design skills, so I can't make these into ads myself, but if anyone else would like to make an ad based on any of these (with whatever changes they'd like), I'd be happy :-) Right now, all we have is the Twitter ad, and I'm not sure that one actually does anything useful.
    – user230
    Commented Sep 14, 2015 at 23:21
  • @snailboat Maybe we could barter with one of the graphics sites - their design expertise for our writing expertise ;)
    – ColleenV
    Commented Sep 15, 2015 at 4:15
  • This clip art of conversation bubbles might be a good starting point for a ELL Cabin chat ad, but I'm an Engineer. You really don't want me involved in marketing unless your target audience loves reading system requirements documents... @snailboat
    – ColleenV
    Commented Sep 15, 2015 at 4:33
  • @ColleenV take a look at the ones I've posted below, and see what you think :)
    – jimsug
    Commented Sep 18, 2015 at 14:22
  • @jimsug Already upvoted :) Setting the chat ad up to look like chat is a great idea.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Sep 18, 2015 at 14:24

4 Answers 4

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Join us in ELL's Cabin!

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Tagline to show on mouseover

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  • Will this image be automatically updated now that it's in commitment?
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jan 8, 2016 at 23:40
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Get help on ELL Meta

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Help this community grow -- follow us on twitter!

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  • This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 12:31

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