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Comment by jlukic | Hacker News Reader

Just my two cents here.

When Eric is describing having to wake up at 5 am and work weekends to make Code Sponsor work even with the proceeds of 60% of all OS projects his ad network funded, it should be pretty clear the other 40% divided among many OS coders couldn’t be enough for their project’s development to feel sustainable.

As much as I commend Eric on trying to find a solution to OS maintainability, I think he actually just reinvented something already available to OS developers, a niche tasteful ad network, I.e carbon ads <https://carbonads.net> something which many OS projects with a large enough audience already include to support development.

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Carbon Ads is a wonderful company. They provide an excellent service. However, per Rollbar, Code Sponsor performed better than they did at about 1/3 the cost. What does this mean for the developer? Scaling. Rollbar was able to scale their budget because Code Sponsor provided more interested developers to their product along at a much lower rate.

What Code Sponsor is is a mashup of Carbon Ads, Open Collective and Read the Docs (with a hint of grassroots marketing demonstrated by Wesbos). The 40% was enough for developers. I paid one developer last month over $600. Two others earned over $400.

Finally, Code Sponsor was available to every open source project. The popularity of the project is what self-governed the amount of money they would receive.

Carbon Ads also does not provide any visibility into what is going on. I have taken extreme effort to give sponsors and developers full visibility into their traffic patterns. Daily statistics and charts. This allows sponsors to immediately know how their campaigns are doing and shift if necessary.

Carbon Ads is great, but they are a black box and sponsors want more.

As a dev, that was my favorite part of Code Sponsor: being able to see which repos were doing well and on what days impressions/clicks increased.

I could see a correlation between posting to Hacker News and the amount of impressions/clicks for that day.

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