I noticed that some adverts (seemingly those on question pages) pass along a parameter indicating that I have a rep of greater than 1500.

My questions are twofold:

  1. Is this a simple boolean, or are there other rep brackets?
  2. Are any advertisers using this? Perhaps for special offers etc?

I'm only asking out of curiosity I guess, but it'd be cool if there were real world rewards for high rep on a SE site.


An advert (specifically to another SE site in this case) on a random question:


Note that keywords is a comma (%2c) delimited list of tags (here 'cakephp' and 'php'), whether the user is registered and the URL the ad was on as well as whether a users rep is greater than 1500.

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If they used that to solely determine the rep of the clicker that'd be pretty naive/insecure. But also, it might be helpful to the team if you list some example ads that do this. –  Daniel DiPaolo Jun 17 '11 at 14:09
As far as I can tell, it's all ads that are displayed on question pages. –  Tom Wright Jun 17 '11 at 14:16
At 1500 rep you're not supposed to see adverts, I thought. (edit: oh, on the sidebar too) Testing this one from serverfault I get: http://engine.adzerk.net/redirect/0/2564/2643/8278/c1141acd20dd4a7b9b96cd3ce10a‌​7153/49/1178/2441/634438918969284134?keywords=udp%2cwlan%2cx-user-registered and SO http://engine.adzerk.net/redirect/0/2333/2444/8277/143d1408fd864800a12ec25790a1‌​3e4e/45/1178/2064/634438919768034134?keywords=c%23%2cextension-methods%2caverage%‌​2cx-user-registered%2cx-5000plus-rep –  jcolebrand Jun 17 '11 at 14:19
I think there's a 10k bracket too, but I haven't paid attention for a while so I could be wrong. –  mmyers Jun 17 '11 at 14:58
?keywords= $TAGS, x-user-registered, x-user-highrep –  Jeremy Banks May 1 '12 at 20:24
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1 Answer

up vote 15 down vote accepted

Stack Overflow offers advertisers the ability to target their ads by user reputation.

There are specific reputation brackets that we can target and pair as necessary to meet a client's needs.

As you mention, this is typically used to provide special offers/rewards to high rep users - those who advertisers would consider to be though/opinion leaders in the field.

Specific to the edit, the campaign being run was promoting other sites within the Stack Exchange Network. We find that registered users with high reputation are most likely to participate on other sites that interest them.

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