Advertisers' Guide (Draft)

For communications email cfz@countfromzero.biz.

Introduction

Google AdSense serves as a stopgap measure for Count From Zero's (CFZ) advertising. Currently to advertise with CFZ you will need an AdWords account. The remainder of this document introduces advertisers to the future direct advertising program. If advertising with CFZ interests you please send an email indicating your intentions and you will be placed on the announcement list for the launch of the advertising program.

As a one-person operation, resources to operate proper accounts receivable remain unavailable until CFZ turns a profit and hires staff. Credit cards and checks will be the primary payment methods. Until hiring starts, as a flexible guideline, purchase orders will be accepted for large orders from public corporations with good financials and healthy companies who establish good working relations with CFZ.

Considering the technical expertise of the audience, CFZ expects a larger proportion of viewers than normal to use software acting adversely towards ads, such as client proxies, ad blockers, and Flash blockers. Plain text ads containing only CFZ links which are forwarded to your site when clicked will probably get the best results.

Virtually any type of ad campaign is available: CPM, CPC, CPA, geolocation, and so on. CFZ will host storefronts and provide custom programming but may require an extra fee.

Advertisers will be provided a password-protected advertising account. From this account advertisers can obtain reports of the IP address, date, time, and URL for each impression of your ad. These reports are available even if impression-based advertising is not purchased. As a privacy matter, the data from any other account, such as names and email addresses, remains unavailable to advertisers.

Software publishers with product listed on CFZ qualify for a sizable discount.

Target Markets

Software engineers (also known as programmers, architects, and developers) comprise CFZ's primary target market. Secondary target markets include

1. IT managers;
2. physical scientists;
3. network, database, and systems administrators;
4. systems analysts;
5. Web designers;
6. help desk and desktop support technicians; and
7. CIOs.

In addition, CFZ provides categories for programmable industry-specific software. The industrial categories appeal to a large spectrum of non-technical decision makers, from mid-managers to top executives. Some other categories, such as ERP and CRM software, also appeal to this group.

Advertising Standards

CFZ chooses long-term profit by building a community of satisfied software publishers and users over short-term profits. This section contrasts advertising deemed beneficial or adverse to CFZ's business model.

The most fundamental question CFZ asks about an ad is

Subjects of excellent advertising include

1. computer hardware;
2. software packages listed on CFZ;
3. computer services such consulting, data warehousing, and web hosting;
4. technical and scientific employment;
5. programmable industrial software; and
6. software engineering education.

This list is far from exhaustive. Restricted advertising only includes ads employing audio or video. These ads are accepted on a case-by-case basis and must provide controls to stop the presentation.

Themes, characteristics, and practices of prohibited advertising include

1. irrelevance to CFZ's primary or secondary target markets;
2. aggressive ads, such as popups, interstitials, or flashing text;
3. dynamically generated ads prone to mismatch words, such as the "looking for X?" type of ads;
4. blocking page views or altering content outside ad boundaries;
5. ad blocking detection for other than statistical purposes;
6. deceptive, aggressive, or potentially fraudulent marketing techniques, such as bait-and-switch, multi-level marketing, stock pump-and-dumps, and get-rich-quick schemes;
7. contests and giveaways;
8. products with little utility or value;
9. vagueness;
10. paranormal and occult products or services;
11. controversial health and medical products and services;
12. pornography or strong sexual innuendo;
13. gambling;
14. human-consumable substances detrimental to health;
15. non-comical violence;
16. criticism of people or groups of people;
17. offensive language; and
18. illegal activities.