Advertise With Us!
Key Things to Know
🌐 Self-Serve Platform
We use a self-serve ads platform (hosted by BuySellAds) which manages the vast majority of transactional details, including scheduling and payment. You also submit your ad creative (text and images) through this platform—and on our end, we use the platform to coordinate any necessary changes or edits to your ad.
No need for a bunch of scattered back-and-forth correspondences. The platform eliminates a lot of the communication outright, and centralizes what communication still remains.
📆 21-Day Lead Time
We require a 21-day lead time for booking ad placements. In other words, you won’t be able to schedule an ad to run within 21 days of the moment you’re scheduling it. That’s set at the ad-platform level, meaning it’s blocked and shouldn’t even be an option to schedule within 21 days.
This 21-day lead time is (mostly) a quality assurance measure, especially as we begin with this new platform. In other words, and quite frankly, it gives us time to make sure everything is right. There’s a little more to it, but it’s boring and we’ll come back to it if we need to.
📌 Starting with Middle-of-Mail Placements Only
Again, keeping things simple to start. This is the ad placement we’ve used for the longest and with the most success across our beta advertisers. It’s a dedicated block of our daily email, roughly 250 words as close to the middle as possible (plus your logo and link in the email masthead).
We do intend to expand our placement options over time. We have some candidates for new ad placements within theCLIKK, and we’re also toying with the idea of whole-mail takeovers (though the inventory would be limited). More to come in the future.
More details about Middle-of-Mail placements below. Since that’s what we offer for now.
🔏 Pay in Advance, Funds Held in Escrow
You pay in advance, as part of the self-service process, to secure the spot. That’s how you grab a spot on the calendar before anyone else: you pay before they do. But before you worry that this is our play to deprive you of your cash…
The platform provider holds the funds in escrow until your ad runs. In other words: you might have paid for the ad in advance, but we really do not have any of that money until we run it—because the platform provider (BuySellAds) also acts as a sort of clearinghouse and holds the money in escrow.
💵 Prices Subject to Change Without Notice
See self-serve platform for up-to-date pricing. Quite honestly, we don’t yet trust ourselves to remember to update the pricing on XYZ webpages and ABC channels and so forth, and it’s still pretty fluid. So we’re just not gonna publish prices here (not yet) and we’ll refer you straight to the one main source for this information, which is our self-serve platform.
Details on Middle-of-Mail Ads
What You Get
Masthead Logo and Link. At the very top of our daily mails, right under theCLIKK’s logo, we’ll add the text “Together With” and then your logo, followed by a quick linked CTA using your target URL.
Middle Ad Block. You basically get your own segment in the mail on the date you purchase your ad. That segment includes the following pieces by default:
1️⃣ “Sponsored By” Segment Header (a transparency measure for our readers)
2️⃣ Your Headline (can also include subhead if you like, or if it splits better)
3️⃣ Body Copy (roughly 250 words, can include an image if you like)
4️⃣ Linked Button with Call to Action (CTA)
How The Process Works
1️⃣ You submit your ad via the self-serve platform. ‘Nuff said.
2️⃣ We ask ourselves the simpler Y/N question. In other words, and a bit bluntly, we first ask ourselves if we can run your ad at all. We don’t expect we’ll need to say “no” very much, but in any instances where that’s the case, we’ll explain why and refund the monies.
Otherwise, we formally accept your ad in the platform’s dashboard, and then we move to…
3️⃣ Editorial review of your ad creative. At this point, we have another binary question in front of us: can we run your ad creative as-is (or with super-light changes only), or will we need to propose some edits and run them past you?
We’ll be sharing more about our editorial goals and guidelines (in the context of ad setup) later, but we’ll explain for now that it’s a balancing act. On one hand, we respect that the ad you submit represents your business and its goals, and that you therefore might not want us to “shake it up.” On the other hand, we do want ads to fit into our mails in such a way that readers are likely to notice them and stop to read them
4️⃣ We run the ad on the appointed date! New leads and sales! Hooray!
How Ad Inventory/Supply Work
👉 We can sell 1 such ad placement per CLIKK newsletter. We currently run 4 newsletters per week (Tuesday thru Friday), meaning there are currently 18ish placements per month. This could obviously change in the future, especially when other placements get added into the mix.
👉 It’s all a la carte and first-come-first-served for now. We don’t offer any packages or bulk discounts at this time; you purchase the ad placements you want individually.
👉 Under certain circumstances, we may restrict certain dates/mails to advertisers. One possible example is a situation where we’re promoting ourselves (a big launch, say). Another example might be some kind of Special Edition where we don’t want advertising at all. We’ll restrict any such dates in the self-serve platform so that people can’t choose them—but just FYI.
Advertising Ethics
Basic Honesty and Good Faith
We will never knowingly lie to, cheat, or steal from our readers in any way—including advertisement for any business, product, or service which we cannot trust to have the readers’ best interests at heart.
If forced to choose, we would rather not advertise at all than advertise in a hollow, unprincipled, or nihilistic way. We have other revenue streams and other options for revenue streams. We certainly don’t WANT to make that choice, but we can afford to.
Reader Value
We take for granted, as a matter of principle, that we are here to serve the readers above all else. Anything we do in the newsletter (including advertising) has to be for the ultimate good of the audience.
This doesn’t mean that we’ll only accept advertisers who hand out cash, or who offer something that literally everyone in the audience wants. You might have a really narrow niche thing—and that’s okay, as long as it’s a narrow niche thing that would help at least some of the people in our audience.