Sponsorship

What may be sponsored

Only what is on this register. A surface that is not here cannot be booked, and a new one needs a recorded decision and a second person.

• Site header strip (Banner slot)
• Site footer banner (Banner slot)
• Homepage hero sponsorship (Hub page sponsorship)
• Homepage banner (Banner slot)
• Company directory banner (Banner slot)
• News banner (Banner slot)
• In-article banner (Banner slot)
• Jobs board banner (Banner slot)
• Job listing side panel (Banner slot)
• Hub Store banner (Banner slot)
• Books banner (Banner slot)
• Equipment classifieds banner (Banner slot)
• Digital assets banner (Banner slot)
• Community index banner (Banner slot)
• Community thread banner (Banner slot)
• Events banner (Banner slot)
• Courses banner (Banner slot)
• Research datasets banner (Banner slot)
• Chip lifecycle banner (Banner slot)
• Newsletter placement (Newsletter placement): not on sale yet
• Sponsored content slot (Sponsored content slot): not on sale yet

What is never for sale

• Any order, ranking, tier or search result. An order the sponsor paid for would no longer be an answer.
• What trends on the Hub. Trends report what readers do, and a paid entry would make that false.
• An interview or guest slot. A guest is chosen on editorial grounds alone.
• The content of a reference page. A reference page has to be usable whoever pays.
• The website and portal register. The register is a record of fact.
• A Build. A Build's position and parts are earned, not bought.
• A company space. A sponsor gets no standing in a community space.
• The persona menu and the order of a persona page. Navigation is not inventory.
• A moderation outcome. Moderation is the same for everyone.
• The pathways pages. The audience is school-age and largely cannot consent to anything.
• Supervised accounts. An untargeted advertisement shown to a child is still an advertisement shown to a child.

A sponsor also buys no verified mark, no expert marker, no contact with members, no list of readers and no rank among sponsors. Where sponsors are listed together, the order is alphabetical.

How a sponsorship is disclosed

Every sponsored thing carries a marker generated from its booking, in the same words wherever it appears. Nobody at the Hub or the sponsor can edit, hide or shorten it. Vocabulary version 1. It looks like this:

Sponsored by Example Company. The sponsor did not choose or approve the content, its order or any result.

A sponsor cannot buy a place beside itself

A sponsor's placement does not run on a page that is about the sponsor or compares it. Appearing among many unordered entries on a list is not a comparison. The check runs at booking, when a booking goes live, and when a page renders.

Who is accepted

Before a first booking goes live, a person records a decision under this policy, version 1:

• The sponsor passes sanctions and restricted-party screening.
• The sponsor has no open enforcement matter and no finding of undisclosed promotion.
• The creative is not misleading.

Work in progress: further categories of the acceptance policy are for the owner to decide and will be published here, versioned, before they apply.

A refusal or suspension needs a second person. The sponsor reads its grounds and can appeal to someone other than the person who decided. Any exclusivity is over sponsor slots only, and never over what is written or listed.

What counts as an impression and a click

Definition version 1, published 2026-11-07. A report and a sale use the same words. A change applies forward, never to a period already billed.

• A served impression is a page shown in a browser with the placement on it, counted at most once per placement per page view.
• A viewable impression is a served impression where at least half of the creative was on screen for at least one continuous second.
• A click is a press on the creative's link. Repeat presses on one placement within 30 seconds from one network address count once, and the address is held in memory only for that check.

Left out of every figure:

• Known crawlers and bots
• Prefetched and prerendered pages that nobody looked at
• The Hub's own staff, signed in
• The sponsor's own staff, signed in
• Traffic to any host other than the public site

Today's figures are provisional. The figures for a finished day are final, and the final ones are what a bill rests on. Figures are totals by page, placement, day, device class and region. The Hub keeps no record of who saw or clicked anything, so a sponsor can never be given a list of viewers.

If a booking ends early

A paid booking is cancelled rather than deleted, with a reason recorded and a second person's approval. Serving stops at once, a cached page catches up within 10 minutes, and the slot can be booked again from that date. The invoice, the ledger and the delivered counts stay. The money settles one of these ways:

• Pro-rata refund
• Credit
• Make-good placement
• No settlement: nothing was paid or nothing is owed

How to book

See the placements and their calendars. A request holds its window for a stated time. A company may also pay by invoice where the placement allows it.

Current sponsors

No placement is running at the moment.