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It's 2016 now, and we've made some changes to the sidebar size. As such, we can now restart the Community Promotion Ads for 2016!

Keep in mind, we have updated some of the guidelines compared to previously - the changes are marked in bold in the Image Requirements section.

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
  • relevant music blogs and websites
  • resources for public domain sheet music and other materials
  • events, conferences, or meetups about musical topics
  • 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 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
  • Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
  • Must be GIF or PNG
  • No animated GIFs
  • Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
  • If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

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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  • I imagine no animated PNGs either :)
    – Cullub
    Commented Jan 29, 2016 at 13:30
  • This is the same text that appears on other metas regarding community promotion ads, and frankly, it doesn't make much sense to me. I didn't really understand it at all until I looked at the 2015 CPA meta thread on Mathematics.SE, and only by example, and it still isn't totally clear exactly what these are. The 2015 CPAs for Math seem to be mainly helpful links, so I'm not sure exactly what is being "promoted" or why they are called "ads". One of them just shows the number of active bounties on Math.SE.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 17:57
  • @Todd We haven't activated the threads yet, but basically, these are just ads that will show up on the sidebar. They're meant for any visitors of your site, so the general idea is for your community to share off things they think will be relevant or useful to people that would visit your site. The idea behind community process is relevance - rather than have random stuff from some outside group of advertisers, it's people from the community giving to their peers, after approval by them. Does this help?
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 19:35
  • To direct on the final questions there, they're called ads because they're in the space we usually place ads on the sites where there actually is paid advertising. They also, well, kinda can act like it. The idea originates primarily with promoting things that are NOT on-site - you wouldn't really want to use the ads to advertise questions within the site for example, because they're already on the site. It's largely meant to show off stuff off-site. However, the bounty "ad" is a very popular one on many sites, and the communities enjoy using it.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 19:47

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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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, now with 80px more width! 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 Jan 15, 2016 at 3:42
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See all questions with active bounties
(source: herokuapp.com)

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  • This is a dynamic advert that will be able to drive visitors to featured posts with bounties
    – Doktor Mayhem Mod
    Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 11:11
  • I really REALLY like that font.
    – General Nuisance
    Commented Oct 20, 2016 at 1:57
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musictheory.net

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  • What's the story with the musictheory.net URL? I looked around in the meta for anything about that - whether it's official or an option or if you just put it in this image as a placeholder. It's a good URL as URLs go, but if there's an ongoing discussion about it anywhere I would like to mention the slant toward theory as opposed to practice or anything else. For better or worse, it seems to me that pure theory doesn't make up the majority of our questions.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 16:13
  • @ToddWilcox It's my option. It's a very good resource for basic music theory and music notation. Some of the very low quality questions we get are much better solved with this resource than any other answer like this one for example where you see I put one of the lessons in a comment. It is aimed towards theory and notation, but I'm not sure why that is a problem especially since theory and notation do make a good chunk of the site and are relatively universal across instruments and it's pretty obvious based on the graphic.
    – Dom Mod
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 17:41
  • Oooohhhhhhh..... I totally misunderstood this entire meta question. I thought a "community promotion ad" was an ad to promote this community, namely Music.SE. I thought "musictheory.net" was a possible custom URL for Music.SE. I did not realize it was an external site and that community promotion ads are for promoting something other than Music.SE. I just looked at some other SE sites and their ads and now I get it. In this meta question, "your community" appears several times. I thought that meant "our community", i.e., Music.SE.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Commented Feb 1, 2016 at 17:46
  • @ToddWilcox. "Your community" does mean this community. But the ads are for anything this community might be interested in.
    – TRiG
    Commented Feb 8, 2016 at 11:40
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