Advertise With Us
Advertising pays for everything on Blue Hole Men. The site is free to read, with no paywall and no membership tier, so display inventory and the newsletter keep the lights on. We would rather explain that in public than let you guess.
Everything below is also the policy our newsroom holds us to. Break a rule on this page and that is a story about us: our corrections policy applies to us as it does to anyone we cover.
Who reads us
We are not printing traffic figures on a sales page. Every number on a page like this is flattering by construction. Ask and we will send current figures straight from our analytics provider, with the methodology and the split by section attached.
The shape of the audience is unusual. Readers mostly arrive on the second-day version of a story: the recall notice rather than the launch, the regulator’s decision rather than the announcement. Business, Tech and News carry most of the week. Auto readers come for regulation and recalls, Gaming readers skew towards the industry side of the industry, and Sports traffic lands on ownership and money rather than match reports.
What you can buy
Display placements run on desktop and mobile across all ten sections, sold directly by us or filled through the programmatic exchanges that take the rest. Buy site-wide, or by section to sit beside a particular beat. We cap the units per page, because a page stuffed with slots devalues every slot on it.
The newsletter carries one sponsor per send, marked as a sponsor message and placed above or below the editorial rather than inside it. We also accept sponsored articles, written by you or your agency, labelled as sponsored at the top, given a visually distinct treatment, and kept out of our news feeds and section fronts.
How sponsored content works here
Nobody in the newsroom writes sponsored content, for any fee. That is a firing offence rather than a guideline. Sponsored pieces carry no journalist’s byline, do not use our article template, and never appear on the running list. If a reader has to look twice to work out whether something is paid, we have failed and we relabel it.
We will edit a sponsored piece for legibility and legal risk, and we decline claims we think are untrue even in an ad. What we will not do is retrofit paid material into the archive. Requests to insert a link into an old article for a fee arrive most weeks and are declined, because the archive is the one thing here we could not rebuild.
What we turn down
Some categories are refused outright, and you should know before briefing an agency. Sitting next to general news makes several of them more sensitive than on a hobby site.
We do not accept:
- Sportsbook, casino and betting affiliate placements, odds widgets and free-bet offers
- Trading platforms, crypto tokens and anything promising a guaranteed or implied return
- Supplements and treatments making health claims no regulator has cleared
- Political advertising or advocacy that will not name who paid for it
- Paid links in published articles, guest posts sold as editorial, reputation-management placements
- Grey-market game key resellers and account sellers
- Creative imitating our headlines, our navigation or a system alert, and anything that autoplays sound
We also turn down campaigns that pass the category test and still smell wrong, and we owe no explanation beyond a polite no.
The firewall
Advertising buys inventory, reporting and a conversation with the business side. It does not buy a preview of coverage, warning that a story is coming, or the removal of anything published. Advertisers learn about a story when everybody else does.
Nobody on the commercial side sees the running list, and commercial mail is never forwarded into the story queue with a suggestion attached. When an advertiser becomes the subject of a story, the story runs and the relationship is disclosed inside the piece. The governance sits on our ownership and funding page, and the standards it protects are on our editorial standards page.
Data, privacy and ad partners
Direct-sold campaigns are served with counting and viewability measurement only. Programmatic demand reaches us through exchanges that require their buyers to honour consent signals, and we drop partners who ignore them. We do not sell reader email addresses, and newsletter sponsors get aggregate performance rather than a subscriber list.
Which cookies and identifiers our advertising partners set, and how a reader switches them off, sits on our cookie policy page. If your ad tech needs a consent framework we do not support, say so early: the answer is sometimes no.
Booking, rates and reporting
Write to support@blueholemen.com with ADVERTISING in the subject and tell us the window, the formats, the sections and your rough budget. We send the current rate card and availability, usually within two working days. Rates depend on section, position and how much of the run you take, and we quote in writing, not on a call.
Direct campaigns are booked on an insertion order, with creative due three working days before launch so we can check it against the rules above. In flight you get impressions, viewability and click reporting from our ad server, plus a note from us on what worked. If a placement underdelivers at our end, we make good on impressions instead of arguing.
