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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

After reading the article, I _think_ this is an advertising network for oss project owners. Not a bad idea except why aren’t existing ad networks meeting this need? And...if most of the pages displaying these ads are served by GitHub, isn’t this stealing money GitHub has deliberately left on the table, and won’t they be upset by that and hence take action? Perhaps the plan is to succeed so quickly that GitHub buys them?

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> why aren’t existing ad networks meeting this need

Because most ad networks are data-gathering scum, and developers know this, thus avoid them at all costs.

This company is at least _promising_ not to track the ads, and only provide basic and relevant conversion data to advertisers. This is a big difference that would mean at least I would be willing to give them a try.

Owner here. I agree 100%. From day one I have been promised to never do any tracking or remarketing. I don’t sell data. I have followed the Ethically advertising guidelines established by Read the Docs. If you are a developer on the platform, you know to the second what your payout is. If you are a sponsor, you know to the second how much you owe.

Owner here. Github is responsible for about 60% of the overall traffic. We support websites as well such as https://jsbin.com and https://codesandbox.io.

I don’t believe Github would ever want to buy Code Sponsor. The goal from the beginning was to provide scalable sources of funding. This has not existed prior.

We do not consider ourselves an advertising network. Here's why:

  * We do not display sponsors based on a bid system.
  * We only present sponsors that the developers choose.
  * Sponsors can select which projects they want to support and which they do not.

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