Media Kit

For nearly two decades now, IT professionals have looked to the editors at IT Jungle for news, analysis, product information, programming tips, management advice, and industry trends. IT Jungle can help you get your message to the IBM i community affordably.

The publication schedule for The Four Hundred is Mondays and Wednesdays. These newsletters will continue to be supported through a mix of text and graphical advertisements both on our site and in our email newsletter.  Our graphical ads include 728×90 pixel leaderboard ads and 250×250 pixel display advertisements, plus a mix of short text ads used in the email newsletter and longer text ads that are used in the story pages associated with each of the five advertising positions that we sell. We have a volume pricing method that we use, which scales with the total number of ad placements that an advertiser commits to during the course of the calendar year.

Here is the pricing for those five positions available in The Four Hundred:

Volume discounts require electronic payment by wire transfer or credit card or by or check sent by express mail within five days of being invoiced. We are giving this discount because we appreciate predictable cash flow, as any business does. In the event that payment is not done within this five days, we reserve the right to rescind the 5 percent discount we give for electronic payment.

As advertisers are well aware in the modern publishing era, there is more to getting out a message than running display and text ads. Sometimes, vendors need to reach out to readers to explain their views on a market or technology and discuss the issues that companies are facing and how they can help solve these problems. This is a task that editors of The Four Hundred and its predecessors have taken to heart and done with a lot of heart even before this company was established, and frankly, even before we were all working together at a different company following this market. This is something that all good editors do.

That said, we cannot do everything and we cannot know everything, and that is one of the reasons why we instituted both sponsored and custom content publishing in 2018. These two kinds of content are distinct from, and yet complementary to, the regular editorial content that the editors of The Four Hundred remain committed to providing.

Both sponsored content and custom content are distinct from our regular content in that vendors pay us to run this content in our publication. Sponsored content is something that the vendors themselves write, while custom content is something that the vendors pay us to write with their own review before it runs. In both cases – sponsored or custom content –the editors and publisher of this site will retain control of whether or not this content is published, and we will make sure that such content meets our standards of usefulness. We can run opinion and other less neutral content in the comment section of our site, which is where it belongs – and we are pretty sure that the content section should not be a no-holds-barred arena for discourse anyway. People on the Internet need to calm their jets and make their ears move faster than their lips sometimes, we think. We won’t let it get out of hand, because that is our way. We believe in constructive, rather than destructive, criticism if there needs be some.

We also don’t think a publication can have a lot of sponsored or custom content – if we see big demand for it, we will initiate microsites that run adjacent to our newsletters. For now, we are going to experiment with this sponsored and custom content in-line rather than off-line with links from the newsletter sidebar. We will see how it goes. In any event, all sponsored and custom content will be labeled as such, right at the top of the story.

The pricing for the sponsored content and custom content scales in a way similar to that for the advertising in The Four Hundred, with stories appearing higher in the newsletter costing more than stories at the bottom of the newsletter. We have volume pricing for this content, just as we do for advertising, as you can see below:

To participate in our content programs, we do require vendors to have an advertising contract. We don’t care what advertising slots they buy – they do not have to map to the content slots in any way – but the vendor has to be involved with advertising to be a part of the content program.

We are also capping the total number of sponsored content and custom content pieces to five per year, inclusive. (That does not mean five of each, but any combination of five and none, one and four, or two and three across these two categories, to be very precise.) And to be super precise, when we say vendor, we mean the parent company, not a parent company’s different divisions. We also are not combining volume discounting across advertisements and content. These items will be sold, tracked, and invoiced separately on a monthly basis.

There is one more issue here as regards to sponsorships in the publication, and that is the possibility that vendors will want to buy the advertising in the same issue and position as where they pay for sponsored or custom content. We are not prohibiting vendors from doing this, but we think it is unwise. You want a mix of advertising and content spread across the year, doing different tasks at different times.

That leaves two other experimental ideas: Podcasts and webinars is the first, and vendor sponsored books is the other.

We have not hosted podcasts and webinars before, but we certainly have helped promote them. We are willing to consider developing vendor sponsored podcasts and webinars and are open to ideas about how to do this in a way that fosters community.

While we like such modern media, as writers, we still like books and we think there is a place to bring all the ideas together based on content we have already generated and update and expand upon that and weave it all together into a longer, more cohesive narrative. It is extremely difficult to do this as a reader; you have to be dedicated to a site and that site has to be consistent to provide such a consistent set of narratives, be they technical, economic, or strategic in nature. We are looking for a few vendors to step forward and engage with us in this effort. So if you want to know more, reach out.

As always, if you want to engage with us for ads or content, start with Jenny Thomas, our publisher and advertising director. You can reach her at 858-442-4972 for more information on advertising and content opportunities.