About the Advertising on GovTrack
GovTrack is a nonpartisan, noncommercial, independent website run by an everyday citizen. (You can read more about the site here.) Although I call the site noncommercial, the site does make use of advertising to support itself and runs a modest net profit. Well, it's only a net profit because I don't pay myself very much for the time I spend running the site. So although I take in some money and pay some of my bills that way, I'll continue to call the site noncommercial so long as I'm not getting rich off of this and I continue to manage it with profit as only a secondary priority.
What paid content is on GovTrack?
The paid content consists of two parts:
Banner ads on the right: On the right side of most pages there is a banner of text or image ads. These are through Google's AdSense advertising program. Google chooses the advertisers to place on this site by an automated process. GovTrack has no particular control over who is advertising in those slots.
'VA Mortgage' link on the front page of the site: On the front page of the site, at the bottom right, there is a link to a company called the VA Mortgage Center. The link has a dual purpose: On the one hand, it may attract GovTrack visitors to their site. On the other hand, it is to get traffic from search engines. Associations with "high quality" sites like GovTrak can help websites get more search engine traffic.
GovTrack has no other source of ongoing external funding.
How is the money used?
There are certain fixed costs involved in running a website that serves as many people as GovTrack does. It's basically hardware and support, which costs about $250/month. Today the advertising generates a revenue well beyond the fixed costs.
Beyond the fixed costs of the site, the ad revenue supports a portion of the time I spend running it, travel to conferences related to government data and transparency, the time some others have spent helping me with the site, and I have donated some of it to non-political nonprofits that are important to me. It was also used to purchase documents from the government with the intention to use them to enhance public access to legal information. It is also a growing warchest for future civic projects that I haven't thought up yet.
