Frequently Asked Questions

The Ad Bard Network is the only advertising network designed specifically for reaching the developers, architects, users and influencers in the free software community, allowing advertisers to directly communicate with the key customers in this exciting new area.

All advertisements displayed on the Ad Bard Network are FLOSS-relevant - we do not permit advertisements for proprietary software.

The entire network runs on FLOSS software, with the source code freely available for peer review.

The Ad Bard Network has been built with Drupal. It utilizes many "contributed" modules, including the Ad module, the Ad Memcache module, the Ubercart module, and the Content Creation Kit module.

No, we sell advertisements by the day and by the month. If you purchase a daily advertisement, your advertisement will be displayed exclusively on all websites on our network for an entire 24 hours. If you purchase a monthly advertisement, your advertisement will be one of no more than 25 advertisements displayed on all websites in our network for at least 25 full days in the month.

The advantage to daily advertisements is exclusivity -- your advertisement is the only advertisement displayed on the network for a full 24 hour period.

Monthly advertisements are displayed in rotation with all other monthly advertisements on all websites in our network. For example, if your monthly advertisement is one of 25 sold for that month, your advertisement will be displayed 1/25th of the time for a minimum of 25 days. We never sell more advertisements per month then there are days in that month.

Daily advertisements are displayed exclusively for a full 24 hour period on all member websites. So, no matter how many daily (no more than 5) or monthly (no more than 25) advertisements we sell, your daily advertisement will be the only advertisement displayed on all websites on our network for a full 24 hour period -- no other advertisements will be displayed during that time.

No. The Ad Bard Network accepts only FLOSS-appropriate ads.

Yes, so long as clicking the advertisement takes the visitor to a page that only talks about your GNU/Linux services. Your advertisement and the page your advertisement links you to must not suggest the use of proprietary software to be appropriate for the Ad Bard Network.

The Ad Bard Network only displays one format of advertisement, comprised of both an image and some text. The image must be 120 pixels wide by 90 pixels tall. The text must be no more than 80 characters long.

We support the following static image formats: pngs, jpegs, and static gifs. We do not allow animated gifs or flash advertisements.

When you place an order for an advertisement on the Ad Bard Network, your ad is placed into a queue for review by all members of our network. All members are allowed to vote and comment on the advertisement for 72 hours. Member website votes are weighted based on the number of impressions their website has provided the network over the past 7 days. Appropriate advertisements receiving more yes votes than no votes are selected to be displayed on our network.

Click here to view live statistics about websites on our network.

If you have a website that pertains in some way to FLOSS, then absolutely!

Sorry, but the network is dedicated only to websites that are FLOSS-relevant and advertisers that are FLOSS-appropriate. That is the main purpose of the Ad Bard Network.

Yes! So long as your website is somehow relevant to FLOSS some of the time, you may join the Ad Bard Network.

We manually review every website that asks to join the Ad Bard Network. If we do not find any content relevant to FLOSS on your website, then we send you an email telling you that your website is not appropriate for the Ad Bard Network. If we missed FLOSS content, please reply to this email and provide some links to appropriate content on your website.

The Ad Bard Network was created to bring FLOSS-appropriate advertisers together with FLOSS-relevant websites.

The Ad Bard Network tracks how many times advertisements are displayed on your website, as well as how many advertisements are clicked on your website. The more advertisements you display on your website, and the better your click through rate, the larger your earnings.

Your earnings will be calculated each month, based on what percentage of the the network's total impressions and clicks came from your website. Your earnings and the algorithm used to determine your earnings will be displayed in your account. Payment will then be made each month if you have earned more than $50 since your last payment. If you do not earn more than $50, your earnings will be saved and added to your subsequent earnings until you have earned more than $50.

All payments will be made through PayPal.com. At a future time, we will explore using alternative payment methods. If you are unable to accept payment via PayPal, please let us know what online payment methods you can accept so that we can review the possibility of adding support for that payment method in the future.

You will need to add the following exception in Ad Block to prevent it from blocking Ad Bard Network advertisements:


@@http://*adbard.net/*


FLOSS stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

The Ad Bard Network accepts only FLOSS-appropriate ads: that is, advertisements that are relevant to free and open source software, for services and products and sites that do not suggest use of proprietary software. (We do not concern ourselves with firmware in devices where users do not generally install software.)

A comment in the source JavaScript reads as follows:


* Copying and distribution of this file, with or without
* modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty
* provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved.
* This file is offered as-is, without warranty of any kind.


Note that we minimize the JavaScript before serving it on member websites to make ad serving as fast and efficient as possible. This includes stripping all comments and extra white space from the script. The minimized JavaScript is provided under the same conditions as the linked source above.