MacZealots Sponsorship Opportunities
MacZealots is now offering unique sponsorship opportunities. Similar to Google's AdSense program, MacZealots is offering text-only sponsorships. We encourage eager sponsors to read through the outline of our program and contact us at with any further inquiries.
Why Sponsors? Why now?
When MacZealots was founded over two years ago, we wanted to provide a wealth of information to the Macintosh community that wasn't being covered anywhere else — we also wanted to provide it free of cost.
Our first year saw tremendous success and we've enjoyed a healthy, yet steady growth ever since. With the popularity of our site came some pretty hefty hosting bills, more periodic updates and an increased workload. The site was funded entirely out-of-pocket, and eventually the shared burden between three college students became too great; we had to do something. Rather than close up shop or stop writing altogether we thought “sponsorships” were a much better idea.
What Will We Do With The Funds?
All money we collect from our sponsorships will go toward paying our bills and funding research on new articles. 100% of our sponsorship campaign revenue will go to pay for hosting, first and foremost. We've got an enterprise class, dedicated virtual server at (mt) Media Temple that costs us nearly $90 a month so it's our chief concern to keep our site running. All other expenses will take a back seat to hosting, but we'd also like to develop enough of a campaign to help fund trips to send us to workshops and conferences like Apple's WorldWide Developer's Conference (WWDC) and the Macworld Expos.
As college students, time management is key, so if we can augment our part-time jobs with revenue from sponsorships we can afford to spend more time writing all in the promise of continuing to provide new content and fresh ideas.
Sponsorship Locations
There are two sponsorship locations for prospective partners to reserve. The first—and most prominent—is a large horizontal area just under our global navigation. We reframe from calling it a banner ad, but like any other product placement it's all about location, location, location!
Since we're only offering one slot in this location, this huge opportunity to promote your business is wonderful but requires that you notify us as soon as you think you might be interested. Being that your sponsorship will be placed directly under our global navigation, your product/company/service will receive a considerable amount of visibility and command our readers' attention.
This top sponsorship slot is approximately a 175px by 35px area suitable for your company's logo, product tagline or anything else you can fit in there. We'll link directly to your site or to a specific page within your site if you'd prefer.
- Your sponsorship will appear on every single page of our site.
- Sponsorships can be reserved for a little as 2 weeks or up to 6 months at a time.
- If we don't have a reserved sponsor for an available slot, we reserve the right to use that space for whatever we chose.
Recommended Sponsors
The second sponsorship location is on our sidebar, directly under our search box. Your sponsorship will appear in the “Recommended” area of our sidebar and be seen on a rotation.
Like our first sponsorship location, this is a premium space that commands attention and will appear above the fold—the top-most portion of our site that is seen before the reader scrolls down the page. This ensures that the majority of our readers will see sponsorships regardless of how large or small their browser window is set.
Similar to Google's AdSense program, we're offering “text-only” sponsorships for the “Recommended” area of our sidebar. Here's how it works:
- There are only five sponsorship slots available for the sidebar.
- If there are fewer than five sponsors, we can arrange for double booking, but we reserve the right to use the unreserved slots for our own purposes.
- The five sponsorship slots will run on a random rotation. Your placement will appear alone and on all of our pages, but on a random basis; this it to ensure that the same sponsor does not always appear on the same page.
- You can have up to 7 lines of text, up to 80 characters total, with a single hyperlink back to your site.
How it Works
As soon as we've reached an agreement on the terms of your sponsorship campaign we'll send you an invoice. Your ad will appear the Friday after we receive payment. Your campaign will appear on our site for the duration of the dates we agreed upon.
We will only accept sponsorships for products or services that we believe will be of interest for MacZealots readers and will be worthy of their attention. We also reserve the right to accept or deny any sponsorship opportunity.
MacZealots Sponsorship Rates
| 2-week spot | 1-month spot | 3-month spot | 6-month spot | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top Sponsorship Slots | $100 | $250 | $500 | $800 |
| Recommended Sponsorship Slots (1 spot) | $50 | $100 | $250 | $500 |
| Recommended Sponsorship Slots (5 spots) | $200 | $400 | Not Available | Not Available |
Measuring Your Results
We know that if you chose to sponsor our site you are hoping for strong results, and we're committed to helping you achieve them.
Curious about how many visitors will view your sponsorship? Are you interested in knowing what pages on our site received the most traffic or promoted your sponsorship the most? Our team can provide statistics to help you measure the effectiveness of your sponsorship campaign.
Knowing what type of information you need to help benchmark your success is important to us, so before you become a sponsor, be sure to mention the type of details you'd like us to keep track of.
How to Become a Sponsor
If you're an advertiser, simply send an e-mail to and we'll get things started. If you work for a company that you think might do well sponsoring MacZealots but you're not responsible for advertising, we would appreciate it if you suggested our site to someone who is capable of making those decisions.
If you're ready to sign up, or if you're interested but have questions let us know about them at: .
FAQs
- What payment methods do you offer?
- You can pay for your sponsorships through PayPal or by check. If you have further questions about payment methods please contact us at
- Can I cancel my campaign at any time?
- Your campaign goes for as long as you pay for. You may not cancel your sponsorship in the middle of a pay period. Our recommendation is that you start out by trying our two-week or one-month plan to see if you are happy with the results.
- Are discounts given for longer than a one-month campaign?
- Yes, the prices are all as stated above. You will notice that the longer you sponsor us the more you save!
- Can I advertise Microsoft Windows products on your site?
- Sort of—as our title indicates, we are a Macintosh-based site. Thus we cannot allow the advertising of Windows-only products. We will, however, be happy to work with cross-platform products.
- Can I use a banner ad?
- Sorry, but that's just not our thing. We are very proud of the site we have created and the look it has. Our personal preference is to refrain from having banners on MacZealots.
- Can we change the size of the top image?
- Possibly, but that question can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. We want to accommodate our sponsors as much as possible, so we are willing to work with reasonable requests.
- Can I buy all 5 spots in the sidebar?
- Yes, but only for one month at a time. We are always happy to have sponsorships, but we want to make sure we are fair to everyone. The best way for us to do this is to make sure that one sponsor is not monopolizing all the available spaces.
- Where do your readers come from?
- MacZealots is read internationally in over 127 countries, including some places we've never heard of. The majority of our readers are from predominately English-speaking countries, with the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany being the most popular countries for our readership.
- How do people read your site?
- When Fridays roll around we send out regular updates to our newsletter mailing list, letting them know about all of our current happenings and new articles for that week as well as update our RSS feeds so that readers using news aggregators can pick up our new content.
- What Operating Systems are your readers' using?
A significant share of our dedicated readers are already using a Macintosh, but interested Windows switchers make up almost a quarter of our monthly page views, with Google and other search engines claiming nearly the rest of the market share. Linux hold-outs even get involved in the action, taking away a 2% piece of the pie.A breakdown of our readers' Operating Systems and platforms is below:
- Macintosh ... 54%
- Windows ... 23%
- Undeterminable ... 21%
- Linux ... 2%
- What browser do people use to read MacZealots?
The most popular combination of Web browser and Operating System platform is Safari on Tiger, commanding a sizable 26% of our page views. Overall, Safari is our most frequented Web browser commanding over 38% of our page views. Hot on the tails of Safari is the dedicated community of Firefox users, coming in second place with a respectable 19% of our traffic.
We have proof that even Windows users love MacZealots, since Internet Explorer 6.0 results in about 9% of our traffic, while Google and NetNewsWire each have about a 7% slice of the pie. The remaining portion of our traffic is divvied up between Omniweb, Mozilla and other characters who aren't so easily identified.
The following are our browser statistics:
- Safari ... 38%
- Mozilla Firefox ... 19%
- IE/Windows ... 9%
- Google ... 7%
- NetNewsWire ... 6%
- OmniWeb ... 1%
- Mozilla ... 1%
* Many people combine one ore more of these means to read our site, so while our statistics cannot be 100% accurate, we do try to be as precise as possible.
- What if I have a question not answered here?
- Let us know at: .
