We’re going to be rolling out an exciting new program in The Old Reader over the next few weeks. As you know, The Old Reader has been entirely Ad free since it’s inception and we’ve been vocal about doing our best to protect our users from excessive online advertising. Our Premium accounts have been very successful, but we’re frankly still not where we need to be in terms of revenues in order to fund planned development and continue innovating this service. We have a small, dedicated, and talented team but our vision for The Old Reader is ambitious.
So we’re taking a cue from some publishers that we really admire (such as Daring Fireball) and introducing Sponsored Content. Premium users will never see sponsored content, but all other users will see up to 1 sponsored post per week in their RSS feeds. That’s it. It’s an exclusive program and we believe we’ll be able to make the program beneficial to both users and sponsors.
We’re also adding weekly site sponsors that would get a banner placement on the web interface. It’ll be an exclusive program and we’ll only accept sponsors that we believe are relevant and inoffensive. We will under no circumstances use any techniques such as tracking cookies or harvesting user data to advertise to our users. And again, premium users will never see any sponsored content.
We know some of you might have concerns and we’re happy to field any questions that you might have. If you are interested in signing up for the sponsor program, please visit out sponsorship page.
