Your ads

How ads work

Ads are how game developers show a post about their game to more people. They’re free, and we’ve kept them fair, for the people who book them and the people who see them.

The same deal for every advertiser

• Ads are free, for everyone. There’s no bidding, and no way to get a better place.
• Every running ad takes equal turns. Each day the ads are put in an order at random, and every quarter of an hour the order moves along one, so each ad has every place, the first included. A day has 96 quarter hours, so when they don’t share out exactly, some ads get one more turn than others that day, and the random order decides which.
• So nobody can buy up the feed, there are at most 20 ads a day, one per game, and 2 games per account. A game can have an ad on up to 10 days a month.
• An ad runs for 1 to 10 whole days, midnight to midnight UTC. It can start today or on any day up to 30 days ahead, first come, first served. A day that starts today counts as a whole day.

The same ads for everyone who reads the feed

• Ads aren’t chosen by who you are, what you like, or what you do here. Everyone looking at the same moment, signed in or not, sees the same ads in the same places.
• An ad is one of the developer’s own posts about their own game, marked as an ad with whose it is. It shows after every 8 posts on For you and Latest.
• Hot and Following never have ads. A post that’s been advertised is left out of Hot, so the attention from its ad can’t push it up.
• Ads run straight away, without us checking them first. They follow the same rules as every post, and if 3 people report one it’s hidden and its ad pauses until we’ve looked at it.

What gets counted

• Views: when at least half the ad has been on screen for a second.
• Clicks: when someone opens the post or follows a link in it.
• People reached: how many different signed-in people saw it. People who aren’t signed in count in views and clicks, but not here, because we can’t tell them apart.
• The same person seeing or clicking again within half an hour isn’t counted twice, and the advertiser’s own views and clicks never count.
• Advertisers only ever see totals, never who. We keep a list of who saw each ad just to count each person once, and delete it a week after the ad ends. There are no tracking pixels, and nothing is shared with anyone else. The privacy notice has the details.