Advertising on Purplemath

Do you have a product or service that is geared toward high-school and college pre-calculus algebra students, and designed to help them succeed in the long term? Then you may benefit from advertising your product or service on Purplemath.

Purplemath's visitors consist generally of high-school and college students, plus homeschoolers (and their parents) and many "returning" students. Long-term visitors tend to be self-starters; students who are willing to invest effort to master the material; students who want to understand the concepts, but who are struggling with poor textbooks, inarticulate instructors, online "education", or the long interval since having left high school.

Contracted advertising on Purplemath is "targetted", meaning that we do not accept porn, gambling, offshore "investing", or other off-topic or offensive campaigns. The advertiser has two options: placing a small "skyscraper" ad in the sidebar of the lessons ("content") pages, or placing a small "banner" ad within the topics of the forum pages. Each page has only one contracted ad.

Skyscrapers are displayed in the right-hand sidebar of lesson pages, "above the fold" and above (or in place of) any contextual advertising on the page; your ad would not be placed on my work history, for example, or next to lists of links. Ads are rotated and served randomly, so your ad would appear, now and again, throughout a user's traversal of our site.

Animations are acceptable (GIF format is preferred over Flash); images should be no more than 118 pixels wide. The HEX-coding for the background color of the Purplemath sidebar is #F8E7C8; the purple highlight (above the sidebar) is #800080. Filesizes should be kept small for quick loading; the entire ad should be under 15K. You may specify tagline text (that is, some text to be placed below your graphic), if you like.

Banners are displayed after the first post in a forum topic, and are usually in rotation with the ads of other advertisers such as Google and Amazon. Forum visitors tend to be looking for swift assistance on a particular assignment, rather than general conceptual help. Thus, owners of on-demand tutoring services (the ones with a paid staff replying to questions 24/7) might find banner advertising more useful.

Your ad should be 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. The HEX-coding for the background color #F1EEF1, and the border color is #A352AB. Currently, text is #6A577E, links are #5D2970, and titles are #612584, but anything in that general range should be fine.

Purplemath served 2.7 million pageviews in October of 2008. During the North-American school year, Purplemath uses about ninety gigabytes of bandwidth a month, serving nearly ninety-thousand pageviews each day to more than forty thousand daily visitors. (Fewer pages are served during the North-American summer break.) The average visitor comes to Purplemath directly from a search engine, reading two to three pages of lesson material.

About 75% of Purplemath visitors come from the United States; another 10% come from Canada and the Philippines. While inhabitants of English-speaking countries naturally comprise the majority of the site's visitors, people from more than a hundred countries worldwide visit the site each month. Recent logfile statistics are summarized here. Objective (third-party) statistics may be viewed through the Quantcast service.

We do not use pop-ups, pop-unders, scrolls, or other annoyances, nor do we use cookies. Your potential clients shouldn't encounter anything objectionable or off-putting while on Purplemath. Linking is provided directly to the target site, with no "leaving this site" or other hindrances between the visitor's ad-click and your page opening.

Ad rates are currently $1.75 CPM. (New advertisers pre-pay $50 to establish accounts, with this amount being deducted from the first month's bill.) Since ads are targetted, the click-through-rates (CTRs) tend to range between 0.4% and 1.5%. Ad-views may be capped, if desired. For instance, if you have a fixed advertising budget, you could specify "no more than 100,000 page views this month". You could also "test the waters" with a very small run of 10,000 pageviews at CPM = $5.

Each advertiser is provided with a secure area in which to review campaign statistics. Campaigns are paid for through PayPal on a month-by-month basis. No extended commitment is required.

You may use the feedback form to enquire.

All ads are subject to approval by Elizabeth Stapel. Products and services aimed at helping students learn and succeed on their own will be given strong preference over "cheetz" or "warez" sites, homework-completion "services", lists of textbook-specific homework answers, etc. All decisions are final.

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