Thanks for your interest in advertising with Small Wars Journal.

Our primary option at the moment for letting youour audience is online banner ads. Our preference is:

  • CPM rates (set Cost Per 1,000 impresssion)
  • Current Sizes:
    • 300x250 medium rectangle
    • 728x90 leaderboard
    • 600x300 half page
  • Served through either:
    • Our Doubleclick for Publishers account
    • Your tags for one industry standard ad serving platforms

We have a few other non-banner ad options that may intersest you, and also support reasonable free self-promotion through our discussion board.  For online ads, we are also willing to work with you for various other ad sizes and placements that are generally consistent with IAB Guidelines.

For the sake of our audience, we are not generally intersted in:

  • Paid keyword links
  • Sponsored, self-promotional "articles."

To Proceed

For direct sales, at this point, we'll accept your fair and reasonable offers.  Please contact us with your proposed placement.  We'll work with you in a no-nonsense way to confirm inventory and develop a mutually agreeable insertion order.

Rates? Make us a reasonable offer. We do OK with our unsold inventory through Google AdSense, so be reasonable. Highly focused audiences like ours may see CPM rates of $5 - $12.  We're still bootstrapping our way through promoting our advertising options. We're happy to offer discounts to those advertisers who jump in with us in a direct placement, based on our available inventory and you sense of the market. Consider $3 - $4 CPM.

Who is Our Audience?

Small Wars Journal serves about 350,000 pages a month to about 110,000 visitors, of which about 43% are repeat visitors.  We tend to have some fairly long page views, with the average stay on a thread display in the discussion board approaching 3 minutes and the SWJ Blog main page at over 4 minutes.

Pardon the mis-mash of data, anecdotes and hyperbole, but we do not yet have audience demographics dialed in to go with our solid basic statistics.  We cannot quantitatively support the following statements.  However, we are confident from anecdotal evidence that our audience is:

  • Overwhelmingly college educated and voracious consumers of media.
  • Actively interested and engaged in foreign policy, politics, and international affairs.
  • Motivated and generally positioned to influence decision makers in government, defense, politics, academia, and media.

Small Wars are broad spectrum endeavors spanning many fields of practice and cultures.  Our readership is weighted toward the US (77%) and does have strong military participation, but our audience is truly diverse and international. 

What are Small Wars and what is Small Wars Journal?

Conventional force on force military actions may account for some of the world's most significant history and most desperate moments, but they are relatively rare. On the other hand, militaries and nations have been, are now, and will continue to be regularly engaged in “lesser” conflicts. These so-called Small Wars are an enduring feature of modern politics.

Effectiveness in prosecuting Small Wars increases the international policy options open to a nation and its partners; ineffectiveness severely limits options and hobbles the ability to positively influence the global environment.  True effectiveness in Small Wars is not a lesser included capability of a force tailored for conventional major theater war.  Further, there is a general consensus that all elements of national power, not just the military, must be coordinated and applied to achieve foreign policy goals.  There is, unfortunately, a huge gap between understanding the necessity of such coordination and effectively achieving good and lasting outcomes in extraordinarily complex and specific situations. 

Small Wars practitioners and critical thinkers need a serious, professional, open source, unclassified, inclusive, unofficial community of interest to accelerate the pace and effectiveness of exploration, education, and discovery.  Small Wars Journal fills that critical need, providing neutral ground in an active but highly segmented and cloistered field.  Small Wars Journal does not pretend to be the town crier, but rather the town square in the little town in Switzerland that just happens to be the cross-roads where insiders, movers and thought leaders come to find out and influence what is going on across the community of serious practitioners and students of Small Wars.  That synergy led Rolling Stone to name the site to its 2009 Hot List as "Hot Intelligence" and the "New Must Read," plus Tom Ricks to declare Small Wars Journal the center of gravity of critical thinking and Dave Dilegge, its Editor in Chief, one of the Top 10 COINdinistas.

Small Wars Journal is published by Small Wars Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is:

  • to facilitate the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of small wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field;
  • to assist in the creation, capture, sharing, and application of knowledge of small wars;
  • and ultimately to advance self-determination, freedom, and prosperity for those populations effected by the conduct of small wars.

Other Options

We will be adding other potential venues for advertisers in the near future. We are at work developing attractive on-the-shelf options for advertising partners and readers such as those listed here, but we also welcome your suggestions on how we can help you. Please check back with us and feel free to contact us.

  • Sponsorship of specific forums within Small War Council or sections of the Reference Library
  • Listing and promoting your small wars-related event.
  • Various sponsorships and promotion of upcoming events conducted by Small Wars Foundation.

Reasonable Free Self-Promotion

You are welcome to sign up on the Small Wars Council discussion board and make a post introducing your efforts that are relevant to our community. That's free. We have the Miscellaneous Goings On forum for just this sort of thing, or perhaps another forum will be particularly relevant. Do not be the least bit concerned about doing this for appropriate items. But heed the following to keep it reasonable:

  • Be relevant, not shameless.
  • A post with a pointer to your endeavor and a summary of why it is of interest to our members is welcome. Advertising or reposting under the façade of a referral are not.  If you do go for an unsolicited non sequitur insert, pick one vaguely relevant forum and launch one thread. Don’t shotgun. That’s spamming, of which our members and moderators take a dim view.
  • You’ll note the forum rules speak to disclosure of commercial interests. Please do so.
  • It’s fine and even encouraged to engage with members on your issues, within reason and with appropriate disclosure. And fine to put, for example, a link to your blog or your company in your profile signature. But don’t make gratuitous all me, all the time posts that hijack all the oxygen in your space.