The Publisher Spotlight is a series in which we’ll be introducing premium publishers who are using Partner Connect to develop business relationships with relevant and interested advertisers. In this post, Eric Simons, co-founder of the open source developer-focused education platform Thinkster (and also famously known as the AOL Squatter), speaks about his success with the Partner Connect Publisher Exchange.
Can you tell me about Thinkster and its audience?
Thinkster is a learning platform for developers who are interested in continuing their education and skill development by learning about some of the more bleeding edge JavaScript technologies. Our course structures are a mix between blogging and course platforms.
Our user base consists mainly of experienced front-end JavaScript developers with a wide range of coding interests and experience. Generally, these are professionals who have been working for several years at technology companies or startups, and are very good at what they’re doing. Currently, we receive about 120-150K unique visitors per month and are growing 30% monthly.
We have already engaged in several partnerships within the past month. Since we have a more technical user base, the advertisers that are most interested in our audience tend to be B2B companies with a strong technology focus: enterprise software, software analytics, and cloud infrastructure companies.
How did Partner Connect help you address your business needs?
There are a couple really interesting benefits we’ve found with Partner Connect. First, it’s given us an opportunity to create an advertising-based revenue stream without degrading the user experience on our site by cluttering it with ads. Second, and more interestingly, creating that revenue stream has given us the freedom to think about our product offering and to take different approaches with our pricing. For example, by knowing we can rely on the Partner Connect revenue stream, we can offer courses at a lower price or even for free.
What’s one thing about Partner Connect that surprised you?
We couldn’t believe how easy it was to get set up. It’s hard to beat just dropping a JavaScript tag on our site. I actually checked in with the Perfect Audience team (who’ve been awesome and amazingly helpful) just to make sure that it was that simple and that we weren’t missing anything. Once we had the tracking tag installed, all we had to do was wait for our audience pools to build up, and we were generating revenue.
Interested in targeting Thinkster's audience? Learn more about audience extension with Partner Connect!
About the Author
Eric Simons is the co-founder of Thinkster, an open source developer-focused education platform.