Advertise With Us!

General Protection Fault is one of the Web's longest continuously running comic strips. Because of its venerable longevity and its (mostly) impeccable update record, it has garnered tens of thousands of daily readers and measures its traffic in millions of page views per month. GPF fans (called "Faulties") are typically strongly technically inclined, often coming from computer-related fields such as programming or information technology, or are currently studying to enter such fields. While predominantly male, Faulties also come in a fair number of female makes and models. Faulties come from a wide range of model years, ranging from fresh off the lot to sitting on cinder blocks in the front lawn gathering rust, although most can be said to be between 18 and 35 years of age, so they've been around the block at least once or twice, maybe even on the highway a time or two.

Here are some recent readership demographic statistics collected by a voluntary advertiser survey as of April 21, 2009:

• Top three age groups are 25-34 (32%), 18-24 (30%), and 35-44 (20%).
• Gender: 82% male, 18% female.
• 93% of our readers are either currently in college or already have some level of college degree.
• 30% of our readers work in some sort of technical capacity; 27% are currently students at some educational institution; 19% classify themselves as "professionals".
• 51% spend more than 20 hours per week online; 25% spend 11-20 hours; 17% spend 6-10 hours
• Top five countries of origin: United States (59.88%), Canada (8.91%), Australia (6.84%), United Kingdom (3.95%), and Germany (3.03%).

Project Wonderful Ads

GPF currently has several tiers of advertising suppliers, including several big-name, high-level bulk advertising agencies that many smaller advertisers unfortunately can't afford. However, we also serve much more accessible ads through Project Wonderful, which are relatively cheap and easy to purchase. Project Wonderful works on an "infinite auction" model, where you bid a daily price for a particular slot and you keep that price until you are out-bid, your funds run out, or your campaign ends. We think it's a wonderful system, and we've been pleasantly surprised with how well it's served us over the past several years.

We at GPF are very particular about what types of advertising content we believe are suitable for our readers. We want to offer high quality ads that we believe are both entertaining and may be of interest to our readership. Our general rules for managing and approving ads are:

• Ads must be acceptable for general audiences or generally "safe for work". Ads that contain any sort of potentially objectionable material—nudity, sexual content, profanity, excessive violence, substance use/abuse (including alcohol and tobacco), hatred or intolerance to any group of individuals, gambling, etc.—will be immediately rejected.
• Ads must not lead to content that may likewise be considered potentially objectionable or "not safe for work". If an ad leads to a site containing such material but the landing page itself does not contain objectionable content, we will make a subjective judgement call on whether or not to allow the ad. If we do permit the ad, any links from the landing page to subsequent pages containing objectionable material should be clearly marked to indicate that objectionable content may be found elsewhere on the site.
• Bidders who repeatedly submit objectionable ads or sites may be permanently banned, meaning all future bids will be immediately rejected.
• Annoyance banners (rapidly flashing animations, ads than masquerade as operating system dialog boxes, sound ads, ads that launch pop-ups or pop-unders, etc.) will be rejected.
• For various reasons, we refuse to permit advertising from the following categories of sites and all bids for these types of sites will be immediately rejected and the bidder potentially banned:
  • Scam sites: "get rich quick" schemes, "work from home" scams, pyramid schemes, diet scams, "debt relief" affiliate schemes, "freebie" sites that front for e-mail harvesters, etc.;
  • Online dating services and "hook up" sites, especially those with open comments, profiles, or forums with little or no content restrictions;
  • Online or offline gambling in any form, including "meta" sites about gambling but not offering gambling services themselves;
  • Sites dedicated to endorsing or promoting political views or endorsing political candidates, or sites where the majority of content is political;
  • "Warez" or download sites hosting or promoting the illegal distribution of copyrighted content;
  • Sites containing viruses, exploits, and other malware or promoting, encouraging, or enabling the use of such exploits.
• Webcomics, blogs, and podcasts looking to advertise here should have a minimum of 30 updates (i.e one month of daily updates, 2-3 months of tri-weekly updates, seven months of weekly updates, etc.) in their archives before bidding. We review a sampling of each archive for many of the criteria listed above, and if you only have a few updates we won't have a fair sampling of content to preview when trying to determine if your site meets the content guidelines. (And yes, we will look at both your oldest and most recent updates, so that F-bomb you dropped way back in update #3 will count against you.)
• Make sure your site actually works. If we attempt to walk through your archives to review your content and we can't get to your 2000-update archive because the navigation links don't work, don't expect your bid to be approved.
• If your FAQ, About page, or other supplemental material claims your site is "not safe for work", your bid will likely be rejected right away. Sorry we can't accept your ad, but thanks for being up-front and forthcoming.
• We reserve the right to reject any ad from any advertiser at our sole discretion and without explanation. However, if you ask us politely and agree to respect our reasons, we'll probably tell you why you were rejected.
• We personally inspect every ad bid and site ourselves. But since we're not robots (contrary to popular belief), we do require food, sleep, and occasional recreation time. Therefore, if you don't want your bid to expire without ever being looked at, please give us at least a few days lead time to inspect your ad and site before your campaign runs. We usually get to bids within a few hours, but occasionally it can take a day or more before we have a chance to look at them.
• If you want your bid to have an even remote chance of being approved, do NOT place your bid on the weekend. We rarely have time to review bids on the weekend, and we see a lot of bids come and go without even being reviewed because we can't get to them. If you want to start your campaign on Monday, place your bid on the Friday prior to its start.
• Podcast and video sites: Please allow for additional review time. For various reasons, we can only review such sites from certain locations, severely limiting the amount of time we can devote to reviewing your content. In addition, the time-based nature of the content implies a minimum amount of time required for the review. Unless you provide us with additional time to review your content with repsect to the above criteria, your bids will likely expire without ever being reviewed, meaning we'll both miss out on the opportunity.
• If you time your campaign to expire within an hour or two of your bid being placed, don't expect it to even get looked at. If we don't have time to review it, it will never get to the site.

We should point out, of course, that Fautlies have the option to subscribe to our GPF Premium service. One of Premium's many features is the ability to turn off all ads on this site, and this feature is turned on by default. This means that there will always be the chance that some of our most hard core, die-hard fans will not be seeing your ads. However, no matter how much we'd love to see everyone become a subscriber, the ratio of subscribers to our total readership is very, very low (currently less than 1%). Therefore, you shouldn't be too concerned about not reaching any of our readers. For that matter, subscribers also have the ability to turn ads back on, so they can access Premium content while still showing ads. (For some reason, these people like giving us as much money as possible. Can you blame us for accommodating them?)

Please view our Project Wonderful profile to see a complete list of our current advertising options. Direct links to our current ads slots are also listed below, although they may be slightly less current:

• 728 x 90 Leaderboard, above the fold, at the top of every page. Note that PW ads are served in this slot after all other ad feeds are exhausted. However, the size and location of this slot makes it prime real estate and still very much worth the price.
• 160 x 600 Skyscraper, above the fold, to the right of the content on every page. Note that small screen resolutions (less than 1024 x 768) may have this ad appear off-screen, scrolled to the right. Also note that PW ads are served in this slot after all other ad feeds are exhausted. However, the size and location of this slot makes it prime real estate and still very much worth the price.
• 125 x 125 Small Square Ads, to the right of the content on every page. The placement of this ad in relation to the skyscraper ad is random, so sometimes it will be above the fold (over the skyscraper) or below it (below the skyscraper). Like the skyscraper, this ad may appear off screen at low screen resolutions. Note that this slot is solely dedicated to PW ads, so it will never compete with other ad suppliers, guaranteeing that this ad will always be seen.
• 117 x 30 Button Ads, displayed in a "ribbon" of five across, currently displayed in the best location of all: directly under the strip on the main page and all archive pages. Despite its small size, this ad block has the best possible location and is less susceptible to "banner blindness" than the other slots. Note that this slot is solely dedicated to PW ads, so it will never compete with other ad suppliers, guaranteeing that this ad will always be seen.
• 300 x 250 Big Box Ad, typically in-lined directly into the content, floating randomly to the left or right. This slot appears on the main page, all archive pages, and in most pages containing large blocks of text. On the main and archive pages this will be below the fold, next to the archive navigation controls (storyline drop-down, calendar, etc.); on most text pages, however, it will be above the fold. Note that PW ads will be served in this slot after all other ad feeds are exhausted. However, the size and location of this slot makes it prime real estate and still very much worth the price.

In-House Dedicated Ads

We are currently experimenting with dedicated in-house advertising. What this means is that you can purchase one of the given ad slots above directly from us, either for a specific period of time (say, one week) and/or for a certain percentage of page views. Your ad will be inserted at the front of the line, before all other ad feeds for that slot. We like to think of this as a kind of site sponsorship, and as a premium advertising option. There are no middle-men to dip into the pot and no third-party servers to go down and screw up your campaign. For an additional fee, we can even potentially design a customized ad image featuring the GPF cast, specifically tailored to your campaign.

Since we're still in the experimental phase on this, you'll have to e-mail Jeff and negotiate for a price quote. Once we have a few in-house campaigns under our belt, we'll be able to better formalize our price structure. We'd also like to space out our in-house campaigns so they don't overlap and they don't compete too heavily with our third-party feeds (for now). Note that in-house ads are still subject to Premium ad-blocking as described above.