A brands success starts here

About.com requires 5 business days to test and prop third party rich media such as Eyeblaster, Unicast and PointRoll, rich media file types, sponsorship elements, and all other non-standard creative submissions. Please allow ample time for this process prior to promotion start date. For example, creative/copy changes that should start on a Monday morning must be received by the beginning of the business day the previous Monday. One week advanced notice is recommended for new advertisers.

All ad units, including intrusive ad units are served through an iframe. If you are using a Rich Media Or Rich Media Vendor other than the ones listed below, please contact your About.com Account Executive to ensure compatibility with our tagging.


Overpage Overlay / Floating Ad Guidelines:
  • Initial Play: Max creative area of 600x600, close button must be easily visible, 15 second timeout.
  • Leave-behind: Max creative area of 150x150, close button must be easily visible, 10 second timeout.
  • Audio must be User Initiated and also must include a visible mute button
  • Polite Download File size 150K inclusive of both the initial play and the leave-behind.
  • Non-Polite Download File Size 30K.
  • We also offer Homepage Takeovers on About.com for a maximum of 1 week. Frequency cap of 1 per User. No Leave Behinds allowed
  • Atlas Rich Media, DART Motif, Eyeblaster, Eyewonder, Point Roll (Bad Boy), and United Virtualities, are all accepted.

Commercial Breaks

  • Full Page Ad that has the look and feel of About.com
  • File Size: can be up to 2 MB's
  • About.com Logo must be integrated onto the Commercial Break
  • "Skip This Ad" Button must visibily be placed onto the ad
  • 15 second time out
  • Video is accepted
  • DART Motif, Eyeblaster, and Unicast/ViewPoint are all accepted.
Expandable Ad Guidelines:
Expanding creatives are ads which expand in place in order to give the banner more real estate and keep the user on the site. We have approved expanding banner technology from Pointroll, Eyeblaster, Interpolls, Eyewonder, DART Motif and Atlas Rich Media.
  • Initial load must conform to our specifications - as an example - 728x90 has a 30K max file size limit. This might be broken out as: 3K for HTML code, 27K for images and graphics for initial creative visual. The subsequent loads may go up to 1MB (polite download only)
  • Mouse Over / Mouse Off: When the user passes a mouse over the creative, the panel expands; the panel retracts when the mouse is removed
  • Click Open / Click Close: The creative can be set to expand with User Click; the panel retracts when the mouse is removed or with a second User Click.
  • Audio must be User Initiated and also must include a visible mute button
  • Expandable limitations:
    • Leaderboard: 3x Down Vertical (728x270)
    • Billboard: 2x Horizontal (672x280)
    • Tower: 3x Horizontal (360x600)
    • Super Tower: 3x Horizontal (480x600)
Pop-Unders
  • Window size of min 250x250 and max 720x600.
  • 30K max, loops unlimited.
  • No Active X controls or download prompts are permitted.
  • Pop-Ups are not permitted.