Hi! I’m Steve Feldman, Senior Ad Ops Manager at Stack Overflow. My whole life I’ve been fascinated by advertising. Even as a kid, I wondered what a company was trying to tell me by using one word instead of another in an ad. Over time, I developed a strong (read: subjective) opinion of what makes an ad ’good,’ and what makes an ad ’bad.’ It took me many years– in fact, it wasn’t until joining the Ad Sales team at Stack Overflow– to finally figure out that the common thread shared by the best ads is relevance. Maintaining that relevance is how we’ve managed to avoid one of the biggest issues facing publishers today: ad blocking. …

In case you were wondering, no, we haven’t forgotten about the Hacker Badge. Which is sort of like Eric Raymond’s universal hacker emblem.

It’s explained thusly by Mr. Raymond:

When you put the glider emblem on your web page, or wear it on clothing, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating yourself with the hacker culture. This is not quite the same thing as claiming to be a hacker yourself — that is a title of honor that generally has to be conferred by others rather than self-assumed. But by using this emblem, you express sympathy with hackers’ goals, hackers’ values, and the hacker way of living. …