Advertise With Us
Advertising pays for Somali Update. It is why the site is free to read in Mogadishu and Minneapolis alike, and why we can keep reporters on a story long after the visiting press has left. If you want to reach Somali readers, we would like to hear from you.
What follows is a sales page and a set of rules. The rules are public so advertisers know what they are buying and readers can hold us to them.
Who reads Somali Update
Our audience is Somali and Somali-connected, reading in English: readers in Mogadishu, Hargeisa and Garowe; a professional and student readership in Nairobi and Djibouti; workers and business owners across the Gulf; and long-settled diaspora communities in Minnesota, Ontario, the United Kingdom, the Nordics and Australia. Add the people whose job is the Horn: diplomats, aid staff, analysts and investors.
We do not publish traffic figures here. Unaudited numbers on a media page are marketing, and a site of our size can make them say almost anything. Write to us and we will send current figures from our analytics provider, with the reporting period and the split by country and section. If a number matters to your decision, you should have the real one.
What we sell
Display placements run in the article body, alongside the story and on section listings. We keep the count per page deliberately low, we do not use pop-ups or interstitials that cover the story, and nothing plays audio by itself. Many of our readers are on mobile data they pay for by the megabyte, so heavy creative gets rejected on file weight alone.
Beyond display we offer newsletter sponsorship, sponsorship of a section or a recurring feature, and clearly labelled sponsored articles. Recruitment and tender notices, university campaigns, telecoms and money transfer promotions and event listings all sit naturally with this readership.
Sponsored content, and how it is labelled
Sponsored articles carry a label at the top of the page, in the byline area and in the title. They are visually distinct from editorial, they name who paid for them, and they never sit where they could be mistaken for a news story. Links inside them are marked so search engines do not read them as an editorial endorsement.
Reporters and editors do not write sponsored content about subjects they cover, commercial copy is produced separately, and a sponsored piece is never recycled into a news story later. If something is newsworthy our reporters will cover it independently, and buying the slot does not make that likelier.
Buying space buys space
Advertisers get no preview of coverage, no advance notice of a story and no veto. There is no mechanism for pulling a published piece and we do not offer one at any price. Editors do not know who is in the ad queue, and the business side is not told what is being reported.
Cancelling a campaign because you dislike a story is your right, and it has happened. It does not change the story. Our ownership and funding page explains how that separation is governed, and our editorial standards set out what our reporters owe readers regardless of who is paying.
What we turn down
We refuse advertising that would cost readers money or safety, which on this beat has a particular shape. Most rejections fall into these categories:
- Unlicensed money transfer services, and any remittance or investment offer promising guaranteed returns.
- Diaspora land and property schemes selling plots a buyer abroad cannot inspect.
- Immigration and visa fixers, including anyone implying influence over a resettlement queue.
- Political advocacy that hides who pays for it, and clan-based fundraising presented as a community appeal.
- Crypto, forex and trading products aimed at people sending money home.
- Health products claiming to cure anything, and unlicensed medical services.
- Anything glorifying an armed group, or recruiting for one.
We also reject creative that mimics our article layout, fake news alerts, and ads imitating a message from a bank. Rejections come with a reason, and if we get a call wrong we will look at it again.
How the inventory is served
Some placements are sold directly by us. The rest are filled programmatically through the exchanges that serve our display inventory, whose vendors set cookies on our pages. We restrict the categories allowed to serve here and block creative that fails the rules above.
Any partner selling into this site must comply with the data protection rules covering the readers it serves and must honour consent choices made on our pages. What is collected, by which category of partner, and how a reader refuses it, is set out in our cookie policy and our privacy policy. We do not sell reader email addresses, and newsletter sponsorship does not include the list.
Rates, booking and reporting
Write to support@somaliupdate.com with ADVERTISING in the subject line. Tell us the campaign, the market and rough dates, and we will send the rate card and current audience figures. Expect a reply within two to three working days. Creative is due several days before launch so it can be checked.
Direct advertisers get reporting from our ad server at the end of a flight: impressions delivered, clicks, and viewability where the placement supports it. Newsletter sponsors get sends, opens and clicks. We do not promise engagement rates we cannot measure, and we do not pad reports with numbers describing the whole site rather than your campaign.
