Community Ads and Sponsorship Ads

Your support means a great deal to us here at the Pagedout Institute. The zine is and always will be free to download and read, this is our promise to the community. But we do incur costs while making it, and we need the zine to be self-sustaining – ads help us get closer to achieving that goal. They help us cover the costs and to publish more issues for everyone to enjoy.

Paged Out! zine has two kinds of advertisements:

  1. Free Community Ads for free projects / tutorials / tools / etc.
  2. And paid Sponsorship Ads for everything else.
This page addresses both kinds and provides technical details on how to prepare the ads, and where to submit them.

Ad types

Paged Out!'s goal is to be self-sustaining, meaning that each issue should cover its creation costs. Most of these costs are offset by our wonderful sponsors, who purchase either half-page or full-page Sponsorship Ads. Additionally, we reserve at least one ad page for free Community Ads, which promote free and open projects driven by the community.

Important: All ads will be reviewed by our internal ethics committee.

  • As a general rule, we will not accept ads related to:
    • cryptocurrency and blockchain,
    • AI products trained on works of unconsenting authors,
    • selling or buying disruptive multiplayer game cheats,
    • selling or buying malware,
    • selling or buying 0-days.
  • We also reserve the right to deny publishing any advertisement in case we deem the advertised topic to be illegal, unethical, shady, or borderline / gray-area.

Sponsorship Ads

Sponsorship Ads can come in two formats - half-page ads (750 CHF) and full-page ads (1500 CHF) - and can showcase commercial products, tools, companies, services, etc.

The income from these ads directly supports the Paged Out! project and the article authors (as per the Standard Author's Agreement profit sharing variants). Thanks :)

Please contact ads@pagedout.institute directly if interested.

It has to be said that in a magazine most readers see the first ad. The further the ad is from the beginning of the magazine, the less people see it. With that in mind, and wanting to ensure that every ad gets a fair amount of attention, since March 2025, we have introduced a new feature – ads re-shuffling.

Here is a slightly simplified explanation of how that works:

  1. We generate multiple versions of the Issue’s PDF.
  2. In every variant, the ads are in different slots.
  3. Readers receive a random variant.

Thanks to this, statistically readers as a whole will see the Sponsorship Ad at every position with equal probability.

Some statistics:

We do not track our users, but we do have an estimated number of downloads.

  • Paged Out! has crossed a major threshold this year - more than 700K downloads, and is now on its way to 1 million total downloads.
  • Issue #6 has reached 75K downloads in less than 14 days.
Community Ads

Community Ads are always half-page ads and are published in the zine completely free of charge. The idea is to use the unused advertisement space to spread the word about cool free projects, tutorials, tools, etc.

If you're interested in publishing a Community Ad, please:

  1. Prepare the advertisement as described in the next section.
  2. E-mail it to us at ads@pagedout.institute (and explicitly write that it's a Community Ad).

Note: Community Ads are reserved only for completely free-of-charge projects (in a full-featured version!). If you offer paid courses, free-but-limited/pay-for-all-features tools, etc., please consider supporting us with a Sponsorship Ad - thanks! If you're unsure whether your project qualifies for a free ad, send us an e-mail to the above address with a description of your project.

In case we receive more Community Ads than we have space, we'll have to somehow select the ones to actually publish (that means we'll reject some - sorry!). We don't have any specific criteria we'll use, but we'll probably focus on how interesting/cool the advertised topic is. We will also prefer ads in English as they have a chance to be interesting for a larger audience (however if there is ad space left we don't mind publishing ads in other languages as long as we're able to vet them). We'll make the final selection a few days before the issue is published.

Technical details

At this moment, we accept ads in two export formats:

  • PDF (300 PPI for bitmaps) - use this format if you want clickable links (please keep the links simple - no embedded scripts allowed),
  • PNG (300 PPI).

The ads themselves can also come in two sizes: full-page ads (Sponsorship Ads only) and half-page ads (Community / Sponsorship Ads).

Full-Page Ads

We now allow full A4 ads, if you would like to run one, please let us know; our tooling now supports that, so we're happy to try this.

Note: information on the margins might be less visible in print. A safe distance from the edges of the page would be advisable.

The size of a full-page ad (see also the diagram below):

  • 220mm x 307mm
  • 8.66” x 12.08”
  • 623 x 870 pts
  • 2598px x 3626px (assuming 300 DPI)

Note: with a full A4 page our header (0.9 cm + 5 mm bleed) covers the very top of the page - that should be taken under consideration during the design process.

Full-Page Ads layout diagram

Half-Page Ads

One advertisement page contains two half-page ads, with a 20mm separator in between.

The size of the half-page ad (see also the diagram below):
For now, this is less than half of an A4 page.

  • 182mm x 124mm
  • 7.17" x 4.88"
  • 515 pts x 351 pts
  • 2150px x 1464px (assuming 300 DPI)

Half-Page Ads layout diagram

In case of questions...

...please don't hesitate to contact us at ads@pagedout.institute.