Over the course of the next few weeks, you may see some changes to the content in the right-sidebar on Stack Overflow, and I am here to let you know what to expect.
For background, as you probably know, we recently announced that we are shutting down our Jobs and Developer Story features. While some found job-related products useful, we learned that most job seekers don’t actually turn to job boards as a primary resource. We determined that discontinuing job-related products would help us better serve developers and the broader community long-term. One consequence of this is that we will need to make changes to the dedicated ad unit for Jobs. We've always carried this ad placement, presented in the lower of the two right-hand sidebar ads on Stack Overflow, and used it to promote a list of relevant job opportunities.
Beginning April 4th, you may see that we’re showing traditional display ads in the space formerly reserved for Jobs ads. This is a temporary move while we're working on new features related to online learning and skill-building for our core community. Once we're ready to roll these out, we will replace the traditional display ads in that placement with content related to learning and development. We're in the early stages of discovery and will have more to share with you about this soon.
I’ve written up some basic FAQs for this changeover, and if you have other questions related to this change, please feel free to leave them here, and we’ll be back to attempt to answer them.
FAQ
What’s going on? It feels like the site has more ads than ever.
For several years, we have used the second ad slot on the right side of the page to promote relevant jobs from our Talent line-of-business. Since we’re retiring that portion of the business, that leaves an ad slot open and ready for use. Our plan is to explore using that ad slot for specialized ads related to skill-building and online learning. As we build out the tech necessary to support this, we’re temporarily running traditional display ads there. Once we’re ready to proceed with the new ad type, we’ll carefully phase out the display ads and replace them with the new ads.
Which ad placement is involved?
It’s the second (lower) sidebar ad on the right hand side of the page, and only on Stack Overflow.
Why is this being done?
When we retired the jobs portion of the business, we were left with some significant holes in the ad space calendar. We are currently testing using those slots as normal display advertisements. The primary “customer” for those ads was our own jobs network.
How can I opt out of seeing ads on the site?
Community members who are logged in with at least 200 reputation can choose to turn off some advertising (the top and bottom “leaderboard” ads) by going to your profile, then hitting “settings” in the upper left hand corner, then scrolling down to the end of the page and turning off the “Enable advertisements” option.