Context Builds Trust
Successful developer advertising placement strategies prioritize placing ads in sources trusted by developers. Developers gravitate to developer-to-developer (D2D) communities, including developer influencer blogs, technology or programming communities, and coding platforms that offer peer-to-peer connections based on technical content, knowledge sharing, and skill building. Because D2D communities offer information and discussions that developers value, they trust the content in these communities. Trust, credibility, and authenticity transfer to your brand when you advertise in D2D communities.
Trusted Developer Sources
There are many sources developers trust, but not all offer the opportunity for brands to advertise. Code repositories like open source projects and GitHub are great examples of high-trust D2D communities that don’t offer opportunities for brands to advertise. However, there are many D2D communities where advertising is an option.
D2D Skill-Building Websites
Let’s start with brand-blind D2D websites — in particular, those that are general and not a community built by your brand. These brand-blind D2D communities are often organized around gaining expertise with a technology, tool, programming language, application, or platform. Examples of popular D2D communities — according to the developers surveyed by Evans Data Corporation — include CodeProject and dev.to.
Developer Influencers
Developer influencer blogs or sites have a high level of credibility with their audience. A developer influencer is a regular developer that walks as a celebrity in the developer world based on their accomplishments and leadership as a programmer. Examples include developer rock stars like Ted Neward, Jeff Fritz, Scott Hanselman, and Alvin Ashcraft. Advertising on these sites lends your brand the influencer’s credibility with their audience. In addition, community members like Michael Washington recognize your brand is supporting their community, and they extend their appreciation accordingly.
Media Platforms
Media platforms (that is, platforms where users participate based on the media format of the content) offer an opportunity to support developer sub-communities that have self-assembled on these platforms. Examples include YouTube (which has developer-specific channels many developers go to to view tutorials and how-to’s) for videos; Twitch for live-streaming content for gamers and developers; Medium and Blogger for text (including developer-specific blogs), and Quora for Q&A content.
Curation Platforms
Curation platforms (which are platforms that don’t require new content, but allow community members to post existing, attributed content to generate or respond to discussions) can offer an authoritative context for developer advertising). Curation platforms can be completely developer-specific, like Hacker News, or host developer-specific forums like Reddit. Content is curated by the community itself. Content is primarily community-contributed and promotes conversations between members — usually through controversy.
Serve Ads with Trust in Mind
Technical trust requires establishing authenticity and credibility with a highly skeptical developer audience. Selecting the right D2D community for your ad does more than give your ad a pre-qualified audience. D2D environments lend your ad and brand the credibility and authenticity that they have already built with their audience. Developers consider the source. D2D communities serve your advertising to developers with a huge helping of trust.
