Here at Smashing Magazine, we like to ensure that the content we publish is both informative and engaging and that our readers are provided with real-world solutions to the problems they may be going through.
Sponsored content is very similar to the traditional content that is published on Smashing Magazine, except that it is explicitly designed to bring visibility to our partners and their products and/or services. The articles are not advertisements per se, but rather true actionable how-tos and case studies that focus on specific products or services approved by our editorial team.
Smashing’s audience consists of advanced designers and developers, with a focus on UX Design and front-end development and looks to us for guidance — articles that add value to our readers. To that end, here’s a checklist to see if sponsored posts on Smashing are a good fit for you:
- Are you having a clear developer or designer interest to your business model?
- Are you creating or offering products or services that developers or designers can leverage to solve their needs?
- Are you able to articulate a topic based on you products or services that is easily transferrable to a tutorial or case study?
If you can answer all three questions with a “yes”, please get in touch with Iris, Markus, and Vitaly of the Smashing Editorial at editorial@smashingmagazine.com. We’ll develop a publishing schedule with you that fits your budget and the topics you look for.
Sponsored articles are mostly hands-on tutorials dedicated to specific applications and technologies, but will never be product reviews or press releases. The ideal case is when the Smashing’s readers are able to read through an article and solve a problem, which by proxy brings visibility and value to our partners.
Figures About The Smashing Audience:
Our readership is comprised of all aspects of the web design community, from designers and developers, freelance designers, to business professionals and creative agencies.
- A new sponsored article goes straight to the top of smashingmagazine.com. (3,800,000 pageviews/month)
- The post goes out to the RSS feed (120,000 readers),
- It goes out in the email newsletter (236,000 subscribers)
- It goes on the Facebook page (288,000 friends)
- It gets tweeted by @smashingmag (995,000 followers),
Depending on the topic, you can expect about 20,000+ page views per article in the span of one month after publication, and your article will live on Smashing forever. We see a great average reading time of 5 minutes per article here on SmashingMag. Once a sponsored article is live, we leverage our social media channels (1.2 million friends and followers) to ensure maximum reach for the article. We'll provide you with comprehensive insights a month after publication.
Recent Sponsored Articles on Smashing:
- Quick Prototyping With Adobe XD Shortcuts
- Building A Cross-Platform WebGL Game With Babylon.js
- How To Create Icons In Adobe XD
- How To Create A Responsive 8-Bit Drum Machine
You can book some extra Sponsored Tweets and Facebook posts, too! Please get in touch with Iris, Markus, and Vitaly of the Smashing Editorial at editorial@smashingmagazine.com and he will get back to you with more details very shortlys.
Finding An Author
We typically work with partner or in-house authors and authors from the web community to write and develop a sponsored article. Republishing existing content works, too!
We also have talented in-house editors who'd love to work with you on creating a new tutorial (example) or a new round-up (example). Round-ups with a technical background also work very well here on Smashing (example).
Partner Authors
In the event that an in-house author isn’t available, we should work with you to identify a subject matter expert. This could be an employee or client of the partner or perhaps someone from your community groups. Ideal candidates:
- Have a deep technical understanding of the product or service
- Ideally has demonstrated solid writing capabilities
- Can convey complex technical topics into easily understandable sentences
- Have a background in public speaking, developer relations or community building
This type of candidate will have a better understanding of how to position a topic from the developer or designer perspective which is precisely what we want for our audience.
Marketing and Sales Authors
Please understand that authors who have strong tendencies towards advertisement and promotional materials typically don’t have an understanding of the technical angle needed to produce an article for our audience.
Community Authors
If you don’t have technical or design-focused inhouse author, we will help you finding a respected author from the web community.
- A community author will has an unbiased credibility,
- Will be viewed as someone with real-world, “been there, done that” experience,
- Will be able to convey their thoughts from a real-world perspective,
- May be willing to help socialize the piece by leveraging personal branding and thus scaling the article organically.
It’s expected that when commissioning an author for a sponsored piece that they be compensated at around $500-$600 per article, depending on the lenght and depth of the article. This is especially important to serve as an incentive for time-sensitive pieces.
Get In Touch
We’re always glad to make new contacts and explore new possibilities. If you’re interested in publishing sponsored content on Smashing Magazine, please feel free to get in touch with Iris, Markus, and Vitaly of the Smashing Editorial at editorial@smashingmagazine.com anytime. We will be sure to get back to you within 1-2 working days.