Advertising on Discourse

Support
1

I’m looking to integrate ads on a new Discourse instance. At the moment, there are a few possibilities, in terms of plugins, with varying features.

  1. The official Discourse Google DFP plugin. GitHub repo is: here. It hasn’t been updated in 9 months.

  • Supports Google DFP

  • The Discourse AdSense plugin. Discussion here. GitHub repo is here. Created and supported by @michaeld. It has not been updated in 4 months.

    • Supports Google AdSense

  • The Team Melbourne RGSOC2015 Discourse AdPlugin. Discussion here. GitHub repo is here. Created by @ladydanger and seems to be supported by core Discourse team member @neil and previously @eviltrout. It was updated recently.

    • Google AdSense
    • Google DFP
    • Amazon Affiliates

From a flexibility perspective, the third is most appealing, since it incorporates multiple platforms. I’m concerned about the maintenance and support of all of these, including the official one.

I wanted to create this topic just to open a more general discussion about advertising integration in Discourse. While nobody loves ads, they’re an important revenue source for many small sites and I think it’s important to have solid, flexible, official support for them.

Given the flexibility, what are the chances of adopting the third as the official plugin and supporting it as Discourse continues to grow and change?

2 Likes
2

I am maintaining this plugin. That it hasn’t been updated in 4 months says more about the stability of the plugin API :slight_smile:

7 Likes
3

The README starts with the notice that you should use discourse-adplugin instead, so scratch discourse-google-dfp off your list.

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4

I saw that, but @codinghorror initially pointed me elsewhere. Hence the confusion and this post. Besides, discourse-adplugin is hosted on a different GitHub account, which makes the claim of it being official seem dubious. I’m glad to know otherwise!

7

@neil perhaps make the message there on the DFP plugin a bit more bold.

Something along the lines of

This plugin is deprecated and will stop working some day

8

I have used the SoC DFP plugin a few months ago on a test installation and it worked fine.

I see that they’ve added more size options for mobile views (previously lacked 320x100 - our highest CPM banner).

DFP is the way to go, as it allows you to use AdSense, AdExchange and pretty much any HTML / Javascript / DCM banner you can throw at it. Most of our direct ad sales need DFP and agencies trust DFP reports.

I have to look at the DFP plugin in detail and see if it is as capable as the jquery DFP plugin which we use on other sites. It is on my list of things to do this weekend.

9

The RGSOC2015 Ad Plugin has been moved to the official Discourse org.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-adplugin

Cloning from https://github.com/team-melbourne-rgsoc2015/discourse-adplugin will continue to work thanks to GitHub, but everyone should update to use the official one.

9 Likes