Hacker News and Stack Overflow Sponsorship Buying

Hacker News does not sell advertising. There is no self-serve platform and no rate card, and the monthly Who Is Hiring thread costs nothing to post in. If an agency is charging a management fee to post a job in it, that is the whole review of that agency. What is buyable is the audience around it, priced roughly between twenty-five and sixty dollars CPM, and bought by email and invoice rather than through an ads manager. This engagement is direct media buying into developer-facing inventory, plus the creative work that decides whether the buy was worth making. What the buy actually is: Newsletter sponsorships read by the same people who read the orange site, including the small language-specific and framework-specific lists that are frequently better value than the large ones. Host-read slots on developer podcasts. Documentation and open-source placements through EthicalAds, which sells against docs pages with no tracking pixels at all. Stack Overflow's directly sold inventory, including tag-level placement where your product genuinely belongs to a tag. Maintainer sponsorship through GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective, which is the slowest of these and by a distance the most durable. For an employer brand the ordering changes. The newsletters come second, and your own engineering blog comes first, because a newsletter click lands on your careers page and that page is usually the reason the campaign failed. Creative that survives the comment section: One claim, checkable, no adjectives doing a fact's work. This audience audits copy, and the useful test is whether any sentence in the ad could be contradicted by someone who has used the product for ten minutes. Host-read scripts are written as a paragraph the host can say in their own words rather than a script to be read; the verbatim ones get skipped and it shows in the traffic. No countdown offers, no gated documents. How this gets measured: Most of this inventory has no pixel and never will. Every placement gets its own URL and its own landing variant, and the signup or application form carries a source question. Between the two, attribution lands in a range you can make a decision on rather than a number that looks precise and is not. The spend split is set so no single placement can be the reason the quarter looks good or bad. The point of the first quarter is to find the two placements that deserve the second one. Not included: Any activity on Hacker News itself. I do not post, submit, time a Show HN, coordinate accounts or advise on reaching the front page. Not because that never works, but because the version that works is a genuinely good launch and the version I could sell you is vote manipulation with a different name. Also excluded: the paid job slots on Hacker News, which are available to Y Combinator companies and not for sale to anyone else. Display retargeting. Anything on LinkedIn. Say no to me if: Your documentation sits behind a sales call, or your pricing page says contact us. This audience checks both before it clicks anything else, and no media buy survives either. Say no as well if you need signed insertion orders inside two weeks. The good newsletter slots book six to ten weeks out, and the ones available for next Tuesday are available for a reason worth understanding before you take them.