Advertise With Us

The audience

THUNDER TIGER covers ten subjects with equal weight and attracts readers who move between them freely. Someone opens a story about an interest rate decision, then a piece about a console shortage, then a report on a stage of a race. The audience is spread internationally, reads in English, and belongs to no single market; there is no country that supplies most of it and no season in which it disappears.

What we know about our readers we know from analytics, not from wishful thinking, and we will not decorate this page with a headline number. Traffic figures mean nothing until you know how a visit was defined and over what window it was counted. Write to us and we will send the most recent complete month exactly as our measurement tool reports it, with the definitions attached and the split by section, device and region, so that you can compare it against whatever else you are considering.

Inventory

One product: display banners, placed within articles, alongside them, on the front page and on section fronts. Nothing else is sold, and there is no second tier of premium placement waiting behind a bigger budget.

Inventory is filled by the Adsterra advertising network, which takes care of selling, delivery, measurement and payment. Campaigns reach this site through that network and its targeting tools rather than through us. Ask and we will confirm which placements exist and which site identifiers belong to us, so you can locate the inventory instead of hunting for it.

Formats that never run here

Several common advertising formats are switched off permanently, whatever they would pay. Full screen takeovers. Windows that open underneath the page. Anything that begins playing sound on its own. Requests to enable notifications. Persistent bars anchored to the edge of the screen. Overlays that need dismissing twice. Units that shove the text sideways while somebody is reading it.

On live coverage the restrictions tighten further. During a count, a final, an emergency or a launch, those pages are kept as light as we can make them. The person we most want to serve is reading on a phone with a weak signal and a slow connection, and no campaign is worth the risk of that page never finishing loading.

Things that cannot be bought

Editorial space is not for sale in any form. That covers sponsored articles, native placements, advertorials and branded posts. It covers paid links, guest posts, purchased brand mentions and the insertion of a product into an existing story. It covers buying a slot in a review, a ranking, a buying guide or a list of destinations. It also covers the reverse transaction: nobody can pay to have a story softened, delayed or deleted.

Offers to buy these things reach the inbox constantly and receive one answer. If you ever come across a page here that reads as though money changed hands over it, please write, because none did and something has gone badly wrong with either the page or the writing.

Advertising we turn away

Certain categories are refused on principle, screened out through the network’s controls and pulled by hand when something slips past the filters.

• Political messaging that conceals who is funding it, and political messaging built on claims we can see are untrue.
• Goods and services that are unlawful in the reader’s own jurisdiction, and any campaign designed to reach children.
• Promises about money, health or legal outcomes that cannot be evidenced, a category that takes in rapid enrichment schemes, unregulated trading products, unlicensed credit, unlicensed betting and cures that no clinician would recognise.
• Creative that lies about itself: a fake alert, a counterfeit warning dialogue, a button pretending to be part of the page, or any unit that hides where a click leads.
• Anything that belittles people for what they are.

Spotting one of these is worth an email to support@thundertiger-europe.com. Give us the page, describe what was being promoted and attach a screenshot if you managed one. Blocking a creative at network level takes a few minutes once we can identify it.

The boundary between buying space and buying influence

Buying inventory here gets you a placement, the network’s record of impressions and clicks, and candid answers about what our readers do and do not do.

It gets you nothing else. Coverage is not part of the transaction. Nobody who has bought space is shown an article in advance, briefed on what is being worked on, or able to commission, postpone, soften or withdraw anything. A company that has advertised and later becomes the subject of a story is written about on the same terms as a company that never has. The mechanics of that separation are described on our ownership and funding page, and the consequences of attempting to breach it are in our editorial standards.

Reader information is equally off the table. Names, email addresses and anything else identifying a reader stay with us. What the network receives is the technical detail set out in our privacy policy and nothing beyond it, and any audience picture we share with a buyer is aggregated.

What creative has to meet

An advertisement has to say truthfully what it is offering, load without dragging the page down, sit inside the dimensions it was booked for, and obey advertising law in every market it is pointed at, including the disclosure rules that attach to endorsements and to political, gambling and financial promotions.

Readers here sit under many different regulators, so a creative that is perfectly lawful in one country and prohibited in the next has to be targeted with that in mind. That responsibility sits with the advertiser as much as with the network. Creative that fails the standard is blocked; a campaign already running that turns out to breach it is reported and stopped rather than allowed to finish its booking.

Talking to us

Put ADVERTISING at the start of your subject line and write to the address above. Tell us the product, the audience you are after, the territories and the dates, and we will explain how the inventory is bought through the network and what placements are available. If we think a placement will not achieve what you want, we will say so at the outset rather than after the invoice.

Direct sales are not something we do at present. Should that change, this page and the ownership and funding page will be updated before the first direct campaign appears. Every other way of reaching the newsroom is listed on our contact page.