Developer Advertising Channels Compared: Published Prices, Click Rates and Gaps

No independent study compares developer ad channels head to head, so this guide lines up what each channel publishes about itself. Two publish a price: EthicalAds (CPM from $3.10 to $8.00, $1,000 minimum) and DevOps'ish ($750 per week). Carbon, TLDR, daily.dev and Reddit quote per campaign. Every figure below is the channel's own, read on 11 November 2026.

Published and updated 11 November 2026. Each price and rate was read on the channel's own page that day.

Dupple publishes Techpresso, AIpresso, Devshot, Cyberpresso, Finpresso and MarketingShot, and sells sponsorships in them. Dupple publishes this guide, so read the Dupple row as a seller's view. Dupple's rates are in the media kit and are not repeated here.

Channels at a glance

Table: eight developer advertising channels and what each publishes about price, performance and audience, sources read 11 November 2026. Confirm current terms in each proposal.

Sources read 11 November 2026: EthicalAds pricing and advertiser guide, Carbon Ads, DevOps'ish sponsor page, TLDR advertising, Reddit's cost explainer and Refine Labs' Q1 2026 benchmark. daily.dev and Stack Overflow rows come from the pages read on 5 November 2026 for the daily.dev alternatives guide. These are the channels' own descriptions, not audited audiences. The Refine Labs figures are an aggregate of its managed accounts running awareness objectives and say nothing about developers or about how much spend sits behind them.

What a minimum buy gets on the one channel with a public rate card

EthicalAds is the only developer network in the table that prints a CPM by topic and region. Its Q4 2026 table lists, among others, All developers at $3.10 run of network, Security/privacy at $4.35 run of network, DevOps at $6.50 for the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, and Custom niche targeting at $8.00 for the same group. The minimum ad buy is $1,000; the page lists 10% off at $3,000 and 15% off at $25,000.

Table: what the minimum buy gives at four of EthicalAds' published CPMs, using its own 0.12% average CTR. This is arithmetic on published numbers, not a forecast.

The 0.12% is EthicalAds' own network average for display ads, and its guide says the best ads do "more than three times" better, which would cut each cost per click to a third. Carbon quotes 0.8% to 2.1% for its own placements. That is roughly 7 to 17 times the EthicalAds average, on different inventory and with no stated definition of a click in either case, so the two should not be read as a ranking. What the table does show is the shape of the trade: a narrower topic or a narrower region raises the CPM, and the cost of a visit rises with it.

Newsletters: one printed price, one custom proposal

DevOps'ish prints the clearest newsletter price in this set: $750 for a one-week sponsorship, placed at the top, with "7000+" subscribers, a 46% open rate and a 10% click rate. The page states no period or counting method for the two rates, so a reader cannot tell whether the click rate counts unique people or every click. Its reader mix is also described as developer and operations roles plus a wider technology readership, so it is not a list of DevOps job titles only (our DevOps sponsor audit records that wording).

TLDR sells through a custom proposal. Its advertising page describes 14 newsletters, a 41% average open rate, 22% of readers at "VP-level or above" and a cap of three advertisers per newsletter, and lists three formats: Primary at the top with a logo and up to 100 words, Secondary in the middle with up to 50 words, and Quick Links at the bottom with up to 30 words. It publishes no price and no click rate. The 22% is a site-wide figure; the page does not say it holds for any one newsletter.

daily.dev prices a managed plan per company after a call, and Stack Overflow publishes no price; the daily.dev guide and the Stack Overflow Ads comparison cover their formats.

Carbon and Reddit: quoted, not listed

Carbon's more-info page says the CPM is quoted per campaign and paid up front, suggests planning for 1M+ impressions a month for about three months, and describes a native pay-per-click option. Its comparison page on this site lines Carbon up with BuySellAds.

Reddit runs an auction. Its cost explainer says an advertiser is billed for impressions under the default lowest-cost strategy and for clicks under cost cap, and states no minimum daily or lifetime budget on the page read. Reddit publishes no developer-specific figure. The one number in the table, a 0.30% CTR with a $9.33 CPM and a $3.11 CPC, comes from an agency's awareness accounts across all industries, so it describes the agency's clients, not developer ads.

What Dupple's own data adds, and what it cannot

Our data, verified November 2026: Dupple's Offer Network shows offers to new subscribers right after they sign up, and records clicks per offer card shown. From 4 October to 3 November 2026, 7,808 people in technology saw offers: 53,591 offer-card views, 3,734 clicks, 7.0% clicks per view. Inside that group:

• 1,947 people who named an engineering role clicked at 7.1% (939 clicks on 13,286 views).
• 1,146 who named a leadership role clicked at 7.6% (532 clicks on 6,980 views).
• 4,105 outside the US clicked at 9.1% (2,376 clicks on 26,217 views), against 5.0% for 3,694 in the US (1,358 clicks on 27,362 views).

The engagement CSV holds every row. Three limits matter. These are offer cards after sign-up, not newsletter placements and not website ads, so the rates are not comparable with EthicalAds' 0.12% or Carbon's 0.8% to 2.1%. A rate is clicks divided by card views, and one person can click more than once. A click is not a sign-up or a sale. What the data does suggest is narrower: in this audience engineers and leaders click offers at about the same rate, and readers outside the US click at almost twice the rate of readers in the US. A campaign that buys only US inventory is choosing the lower-clicking half of this audience, though whether that holds for other formats is not established here.

The role mix is the other honest limit. Of 3,012 engaged Techpresso readers matched to the sign-up quiz in the week to 5 November 2026, 261 (8.7%) named engineering as their role; for Devshot it is 43 of 256 (16.8%), a small sample (Techpresso and Devshot files, method). Techpresso has 800,000+ subscribers and Devshot 31,000+, as of November 8, 2026, and neither is mainly developers. A developer-tool advertiser that needs a developer-only audience should look first at the developer-only inventory above. Dupple's strength is scale and technology decision-makers: the tech executives page shows that segment, and the software developers page shows the engineering one.

Which channel can fit which goal

Worked scenario: a developer tool with $5,000 for its first month

An API product with a docs-first funnel has $5,000. Using only printed prices, it can spend $1,000 on an EthicalAds minimum buy and $750 on one DevOps'ish week, leaving $3,250. That remainder can only go to a channel that quotes on request (TLDR, Carbon, daily.dev, Stack Overflow, Dupple) or to a Reddit auction test, so the plan needs at least one proposal before it is complete. The arithmetic says nothing about which channel performs best. Give every channel its own UTM tags on the same docs URL, so sign-ups show which one sent them; the sponsorship ROI guide covers tying clicks to an objective, and the developer newsletter list and Devshot page cover Dupple's side.

What we could not verify

• No independent head-to-head benchmark of developer ad channels turned up in the sources read on 11 November 2026.
• EthicalAds' 0.12% and Carbon's 0.8% to 2.1% are each the seller's own figure, on different inventory, with no stated click definition.
• DevOps'ish's open and click rates have no stated method or period. Carbon's homepage gives a lifetime impression count with no period, so only its more-info monthly figure is used.
• TLDR publishes no price or click rate; daily.dev and Stack Overflow publish no price; Reddit publishes no developer figure.
• The Refine Labs numbers are an agency aggregate for awareness campaigns across industries, with no volume stated.
• Dupple's offer rates are offer cards after sign-up, not newsletter placement click-through, and its quiz is self-reported and not audited. Nothing here claims a Dupple placement performs like any other channel.

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